[In the following essay, Singh traces Leopardi's brief journey from a period of youthful and comforting illusions to maturity and the necessity of abandoning those illusions in favor of a pursuit of truth.]

Illusions—or what he considered to be such—were to play as important a part in Giacomo Leopardi's childhood and early life as in that of any other person. The crucial difference between him and any other person, however, was the extraordinarily swift and unimpeded transition from illusions, however agreeable and even necessary, to truth, however bitter. His journey from the one to the other could not have been briefer or more decisive. “I fanciulli trovano il tutto nel nulla, gli uomini il nulla nel tutto” [children find everything in nothing, men nothing in everything], he was to say in Zibaldone.¹ But his own journey from a child's position—seeing “il tutto nel nulla”—to an adult's, seeing “il nulla nel tutto,” cannot be measured in terms of time; only in terms of a tacit change within himself that amounted to a sort of moral, psychological, and emotional revolution. From 1809 (when he took his first communion and when, according to his father, he was “sommamente inclinato alla divozione” [greatly inclined to devotion] and “voleva sempre ascoltare molte messe, e chiamava felice quel giorno in cui aveva potuto udirne di piú [always wanted to hear many masses, and called a happy day the day he was able to hear the most])² until 1821 (when he composed “Bruto minore,” which if not the first is certainly the most explicit and unequivocal statement of his moral and philosophical position), the distance may only have been twelve years; but how many invisible milestones Leopardi had passed in his inner journey and how many unrecorded incidents in the development of his soul there had been.

Again, while outlining his poetic development in a note he wrote down in Zibaldone in 1820, Leopardi was in a way indicating the various stages of his psychological, philosophical, and emotional journey. “Nella carriera poetica,” he tells us, echoing both Vico's thought and terminology, “il mio spirito ha percorso lo stesso stadio che lo spirito umano in generale” [in my poetic career, my spirit has gone through the same stage as the human spirit in general]; that is, from imagination to philosophy when, in 1819,

cominciai a sentire la mia infelicità in un modo assai piú tenebroso … a riflettere profondamente sopra le cose … a divenir filosofo di professione (di poeta ch'io era), a sentire l'infelicità certa del mondo, in luogo di conoscerla.

[I started to feel my unhappiness in a much more somber manner … to reflect profoundly on things … to become a philosopher by profession (from the poet that I was), to feel the certain unhappiness of the world, instead of knowing it.]³

This change brought him face-to-face with the goal his mind had been slowly but irresistibly moving toward—the conviction about the “infinita vanità del vero” [the infinite vanity of truth].⁴ Yet the vanity of truth did not contradict what was tragically certain about it. Thus, he describes the truth about human destiny, as he saw it, in inflexibly tragic accents in “Bruto minore”:

A voi, marmorei numi
… a voi ludibrio e schermo
È la prole infelice …
Guerra mortale, eterna, o fato indegno,
Teco il prode guerreggia,
Di cedere inesperto …
                                        In peggio
Precipitano i tempi …
[To you, oh marble gods
… mere sport and mockery
Is that unhappy progeny …
Mortal war, eternal, oh vile fate
With you the brave wages,
Untutored in surrender …
                                        To the worse
Our times precipitate …]

These accents characterize the desperation of one who has come to his journey's end, having traveled a long way during the span of a mere dozen years.

From now on, Leopardi's journey toward truth would continue to be uninterrupted; his thirst for it insatiable, for all its “infinita vanità”; and his passion for it unmatched except by his passion for love. But once he had discovered “l'infinita vanità del tutto” [the infinite vanity of everything] he was left with nothing else to discover. His only task was to come to grips with his experiences, his hopes, disappointments, and disillusions, using truth as the sole criterion, the only point of reference. In other words, if the discovery of truth became the goal of his disillusioned life, the journey toward that goal could never come to an end, because truth or the application of truth could never be exhausted. And even though his mortal journey was coming to an end and he considered himself to be “un sepolcro ambulante, che porta dentro di me un uomo morto” [a walking sepulcher, carrying a corpse within me]⁵ his consuming passion for truth knew no abating. For having reached his destination once—the discovery of truth—Leopardi resumed his journey again and again to reach the same goal, to discover the same truth.

In fact, if one were to single out one characteristic that, more than any other, distinguishes Leopardi from any other Italian poet (Dante included) and links him with an altogether different cultural and poetic tradition (namely, the English) it would unquestionably be his passion for truth and the untrammeled freedom of thought and independence of mind with which he pursued it. Leopardi's fortune in Victorian as well as in twentieth-century England—and in terms of the weight and variety of critical thought devoted to him, as well as of the competence and distinction of the numerous translations undertaken of his work, it is unparalleled—owed not a little to the recognition and appreciation of this aspect of his poetry, with which readers of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, Wordsworth, and T. S. Eliot were so familiar. Bertrand Russell, the most eminent English philosopher and thinker of this century, enjoyed Leopardi's poetry and had this to say in 1967 in a letter to me: “I consider the poetry and pessimism of Leopardi to be the most beautiful expression of what ought to be the creed of a scientist”; and as to “La ginestra,” Russell observed that it expresses “more effectively than any other poem known to me my views about the universe and human passions.”

It is not that Leopardi followed or cultivated truth, or a particular kind of truth, as one cultivates a particular creed, doctrine, or ideology. Nor did he father or enunciate any particular philosophy. Pessimism is as old as the hills, and its treatment in poetry is found in all ages and climes. Leopardi was not, nor did he profess to be, a philosopher. But what he offers in his poetry and, in a different form in Operette morali, is something more than philosophy: it is a fusion, not a dichotomy as Milton saw it, between calm of mind and passion at its most burning. So that what he desires on a sentimental plane—“lingua mortal non dice / quel ch'io sentiva in seno” [Mortal tongue cannot utter / what I felt in my bosom]⁶—does not make him less eager on the rational and intellectual plane about the other and equally dominant passion—the passion for truth that is so vital an ingredient of his thought and poetry.

However, Leopardi for all his power of analytical thought—and it was as considerable as that of Coleridge—did not bring any abstract or metaphysical concepts or criteria to bear upon his attitude to or notion of truth. He identified truth, generally speaking, with nature and the reality of things as they are—or as they are seen to be by a mature, disinterested, and disillusioned mind—and with the feelings and sentiments as well as with the thoughts such a view entails. In this respect his attitude to truth is poles apart from that of Keats or Wordsworth. “What the imagination seizes as beauty,” says Keats, “must be the truth—whether it existed before or not.”⁷ And for Wordsworth, the child is the “best philosopher”—“Mighty prophet! Seer blest!? / On whom those truths do rest, / Which we are toiling all our lives to find.”⁸ But neither what the imagination seizes as beauty nor what the child, “haunted for ever by the eternal mind,”⁹ sees was enough for Leopardi's profoundly cultured and skeptical mind. And he could have said to both the Wordsworthian child and to Keats, what he says in a vein of poetic irony to the moon in “Canto notturno”:

Ma tu per certo,
Giovinetta immortal, conosci il tutto,
Questo io conosco e sento,
Che degli eterni giri,
Che dell'esser mio frale,
Qualche bene o contento
Avrà fors'altri; a me la vita è male.
[But you, for certain,
Immortal maiden, know all,
This I know and feel,
That in eternal cycles,
That in my frail being,
Some good, some happiness,
Others perhaps can find; life to me is evil.]

It is, therefore, not what his imagination seizes, but what he knows and what he perceives to be the real truth—the processes of “knowing” and “feeling” being inseparable in Leopardi's perception of truth—that ultimately counts, for one who was free from illusions and who at the same time celebrated eloquently their value and efficacy in human life. But however strongly he might have felt the spell of illusions or envied those who find “qualche bene o contento” in the “eterni giri,” it never distracted him from his unswerving quest for truth, his moral integrity, and his belief that “a me la vita è male.” The silence of the stars frightened Pascal; the “interminati spazi” [interminable spaces] “sovrumani silenzi” [superhuman silences] and “profondissima quiete” [deepest silence] almost frightened Leopardi and dramatically heightened his sense of the contrast between the finiteness of his “esser mio frale” and the infinity of the universe, which made him cling all the more passionately and determinedly to his own convictions. Leopardi's passion for truth, as he saw it (even though it was inimical to happiness), became for him a matter of personal honor, pride, and integrity; it was not merely a philosophical pursuit but also a moral concern. In all of Leopardi's poetry we find accents of personal moral pride as a result of his total commitment to truth—accents that add a peculiar potency to his lyricism, for which one looks in vain in the works of his contemporaries. In the poetry of Wordsworth, another votary of truth, what we have is something quite different. In Wordsworth's best poetry, as in Leopardi's, moral fervor and poetic fervor almost always go together. But unlike Leopardi, whose gaze remained fixed uncompromisingly on the truths of life really lived, Wordsworth habitually shifted his gaze from the outer to the inner, from the visible to the visionary, from earth to heaven. Not only that, but he sees truth as being in the nature of (to quote his own words) something half-perceived and half-created. It was, in the last analysis, a product of his own mind or, as Leopardi says of love, “la figlia / Della sua mente” [the daughter of his mind].¹⁰ Hence, with regard to the kind of truths that nourished Wordsworth's poetic life, one might say (as Coleridge did) about the various aspects of nature: “O Lady! we receive but what we give, / And in our life alone does Nature live.”¹¹

But the kind of truth that interested Leopardi, which he celebrated in his poetry and which constitutes its moral and philosophical backbone, is a truth that originates from firsthand experience or from an unbiased and disinterested observation of nature and society. It is not something half-perceived and half-created. The poet has no choice but to present what he sees around him, what he feels within himself, and what his insatiably exploratory and analytical mind presents him with or forces upon him. If Wordsworth was a seer in the idealistic sense and Blake in the visionary sense, Leopardi was a seer in the most rational and realistic sense of the term.

In fact, Wordsworth thought he derived his light from heaven and that he shone to the measure of that heaven-born light, rather than to the measure of the light born out of his everyday experiences and observations. That is why his truths no less than his sense of reality have an essentially idealistic rather than empirical basis, even though he chose to deal with “incidents and situations from common life” and to write about them in “a selection of language really used by men.”¹² For Leopardi, on the contrary, the source of inspiration was nothing more than his own thoughts, experiences, and observations concerning life; and there was no consolation for him except in truth, however bitter and unconsolatory it might have been. Leopardi considered truth to be neither beautiful nor conducive to happiness. The knowledge of truth, he tells us, “non sarà mai sorgente di felicità, né oggi; né era allora quando uomo primitivo se la passava nella solitudine, ben lontano certamente dalle meditazioni filosofiche” [will never spring from happiness, neither today, nor did it before when primitive man spent his time in solitude, clearly a long way from philosophical meditations].¹³ Nevertheless, so far as he was concerned, however unpalatable or unflattering the truth he pursued it unflinchingly and made it known in his writings, even at the risk of incurring oblivion in his own age or in posterity (“obblio / Preme chi troppo all'età propria increbbe” [oblivion / weighs heavy on he who displeases his own times]¹⁴ by telling people what they do not want to know but what a man like him, once he has seen it or known it himself, cannot forbear from telling; any more than he can unsee it or unknow it. Leopardi's English counterpart, Thomas Hardy, after decades of writing and unbaring what people did not want to know promised himself, toward the end of his life that he would not anymore reveal what he saw. In his poem “He Resolves to Say No More,” published posthumously and presumably written in the last year of his life, he tells himself (more or less in the same philosophically disillusioned vein as Leopardi in “A se stesso”):

O my soul keep the rest unknown!
It is too like a sound of moan …
Why load men's minds with more to bear
That bear already ails to spare?
                                        From now alway
                                        Till my last day
What I discern I will not say.(15)

But, for one thing, Leopardi was too young and too passionately interested in the discovery, analysis, and exposition of what he considered to be real to want to or to be able to afford to make such a resolution; for another, his need to attest to the truth and reality of what most people ignore (or prefer to ignore because it is not conducive to their happiness) was too great a necessity of his own soul and being to be set aside. It was something he could live by, and he assumed that spirits congenial to his own could also live by it. I am thinking of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir, who called Leopardi and Baudelaire Romantic, in the bad sense, because for him they merely portrayed the sufferings of existence and merely questioned fate. They expressed an attitude to life, he tells us, “a perfectly genuine one too—but not a principle of life, not something by which one can live.”¹⁶ Leopardi would have retorted that for most people the principle they live by is to avoid, as far as possible, facing the unpleasant truths forced upon them in the course of living.

He compared humankind's attitude in general to unpalatable truths, to husbands' attitudes to wives: “I mariti, se vogliono viver tranquilli, è necessario che credano le moglie fedeli, ciascuno la sua; e così fanno; anche quando la metà del mondo sa che il vero è tutt'altro” [Married men, if they want to live in peace, must believe their wives to be faithful, each man his own; and that's what they do; even when half the world knows the truth is totally different]. And this because “il genere umano crede sempre, non il vero, ma quello che è, o pare che sia, piú a proposito suo” [human beings believe, not the truth, but what is, or seems to be, more convenient to them].¹⁷ For Leopardi such pragmatism was utterly out of place and inconceivable, and he could well have said, with Dante, that what he has seen and known, “mentr'io vivo / Convien che nella mia lingua si scerna” [while I live / it is possible to see this in my life and in my art]¹⁸—which is precisely what he did and continued doing until the very end of his life. To camouflage or suppress the bitter truths of life was too ignominious and cowardly for him: “Non io / Con tal vergogna scenderò sotterra” [not I, not with that shame shall I die], he tells us in “La ginestra.” It was not so much pride in a personal sense as pride on account of his espousing truth at the expense of personal comfort and happiness that mattered to him both as a poet and as a man. Such pride contributed to the tone and timber of his verse as much as did his supreme mastery over style and diction. It also enabled him to accept the common lot of a man, “nato a perir, nutrito in pene” [born to perish, reared in pain], as the subject matter of his poetry rather than the glorification of “eccelsi fati e nove / Felicità, quali il ciel tutto ignora. / Non pur quest'orbe” [sublime destinies and new / Happiness, of a kind that Heaven ignores / not the least of which those of this world].¹⁹

In this respect, therefore, Leopardi could have turned to Wordsworth, or rather to his spokesman and admirer Matthew Arnold, and said that the joy offered to us in nature that, according to Arnold, constitutes Wordsworth's supremacy over Leopardi, may be “accessible universally,” but it needs a particularly gifted nature like Wordsworth's to be able to profit from it. Thus, it can hardly be said to form a part of the “comun fato” [common destiny] that was the “haunt, and the main region” of Leopardi's song.²⁰ In depicting the lot of common mortals, Leopardi chose the image of the “vecchierel bianco, infermo. / Mezzo vestito e scalzo, / Con gravissimo fascio sulle spalle” [white-haired wise old man, infirm / Barely clad and bare footed / A heavy burden on his shoulders], and not that of one belonging to “a privileged world / Within a world,” such as Shakespeare or Milton whom Wordsworth calls “labourers divine!”²¹ It is true that the leech-gatherer, protagonist of Wordsworth's great poem “Resolution and Independence,” may be regarded as being in some ways a Wordsworthian counterpart, if not equivalent, of Leopardi's “vecchierel bianco, infermo.” But although the Leopardian model symbolizes a condition of existence that is all too common, almost universal, the Wordsworthian model embodies qualities one aspires to, or ought to aspire to, but seldom attains. Thus the leech-gatherer is more of an ideal than a symbol of, to quote Wordsworth's own words, “what is to be borne”—and borne by all and sundry without exception.

Hence the ethos as well as the essence of Leopardi's thought and sentiment—and in Leopardi the two are seldom apart—derive from his concern with what is true of human nature and human destiny in general rather than from his interest in what befalls the lot of only some exceptionally gifted and privileged individuals and their not less privileged experience. Take, for instance, such lines as

Io sono distrutto
Né schermo alcun ho dal dolore,
Amore,
Amor, di nostra vita ultimo inganno
[I am destroyed
No shield whatever have I from pain,
Love,
Love, of our life the ultimate deception](22)
… non le tinte glebe,
Non gli ululati spechi
Turbò nostra sciagura,
Né scolorò le stelle umana cura
[… neither the bloodstained lands,
Nor the echoing caves
have been troubled by our misfortune,
Nor have human cares dimmed the stars](23)
Oh come grato occorre
Nel tempo giovanil, quando ancor lungo
La speme e breve ha la memoria il corso,
Il rimembrar delle passate cose,
Ancor che triste, e che l'affanno duri!
[Oh how pleasant it is
In time of youth, when hope is still
Long and the span of memory short,
To remember things past,
Though be they sad, and though the anguish endures!](24)
… perché giacendo
A bell'agio, ozioso,
S'appaga ogni animale;
Me, s'io giaccio in riposo, il tedio assale?
[… why is
Every animal content
Lying idle at perfect ease;
Why, if I lie down to rest, does boredom seize me?](25)
Uscir di pena
È diletto fra noi,
[To overcome hardship
Is for us delight](26)
Misterio eterno
Dell'esser nostro
[Eternal mystery
Of our being](27)
Ma la vita mortal, poi che la bella
Giovinezza sparí, non si colora
D'altra luce giammai, né d'altra aurora.
[But mortal life, once fair
Youth has vanished, never takes on the colors
Of another light, nor of another dawn.](28)
Magnanimo animale
Non credo io già, ma stolto,
Quel che nato a perir, nutrito in pene,
Dice, a goder son fatto.
[I do not, at all believe him
A noble-minded creature who,
Born to perish, reared in pain,
Claims, I was made to find enjoyment.](29)

In such lines, Leopardi's thought and sentiment have all the marks of an intensely personal participation in what he is talking about. But what he is talking about concerns not his own self or situation, but that of mankind in general. And if he generalizes on the basis of his own experience, as one often does, his generalizations are not the less valid for that. The language of these generalizations bears the mark of Leopardi's genius; but the moral as well as the logical cogency behind them confers upon them a universal character, not because he transforms something that has merely a personal validity or relevance into something universally valid, but because—such is his burning passion for truth—he cannot contemplate what has a universal application without identifying himself with it at a personal level. As the “sounding cataract” haunted the young Wordsworth, reflections about human destiny—the nature of what is real and what is to be borne as distinguished from what is illusory and fragile in human life, hopes, and aspirations—haunted Leopardi “like a passion”;³⁰ that is why his thoughts are expressed not so much in philosophical terms, as in poetically charged ones. No philosopher, said Leopardi, can do without a system, but he himself had none. What he did have were those qualities he considered indispensable to a philosopher:

Chi non ha o non ha mai avuto … immaginazione, sentimento, capacità di entusiasmo, di eroismo, d'illusioni vive e grandi, di forti e varie passioni, chi non conosce l'immenso sistema del bello, chi non legge o non sente, o non ha mai letto o sentito i poeti, non può assolutamente essere un grande, vero e perfetto filosofo, anzi non sarà mai se non un filosofo dimezzato, di corta vista, di colpo d'occhio assai debole, di penetrazione scarsa, per diligente, paziente, e sottile, e dialettico e matematico ch'ei possa essere; non conoscerà mai il vero, si persuaderà e proverà colla possibile evidenza cose falsissime.

[He who does not have or has never had … imagination, feeling, capacity for enthusiasm, for heroism, for grand and ardent illusions, for strong and varied passions, who does not know the vast system of beauty, who does not read or does not feel, or who has never read the poets or listened to them, can certainly never be a great true, or perfect philosopher. In fact, he will never be anything but a cloven philosopher, short-sighted, with dull glance, and feeble insight, however diligent, patient, subtle, dialectical, and mathematical he may be; he will never know the truth, and he will come to believe and prove, as true things that are utterly false.]³¹

Leopardi's passion for truth was, therefore, the passion of a philosopher as well as that of a poet. But it was above all the passion of one who found the ultimate confirmation of what he thought in his own experience, observation, and thought, rather than in any theory, dogma, or philosophy.

And although the more he pursued truth the more he found it inimical to happiness, this did not prevent him from carrying on the pursuit intrepidly; nor did it prevent him from celebrating the beauty, sweetness, and soothing power of illusions, because he realized the essential emptiness of life without them (and, in the case of one like himself with his unstinting acceptance of “l'acerbo vero” [the bitter truth] even with them).³² The contrast between what is true and what is illusory, between what people choose to believe because it is comfortable and conducive to their happiness—as summed up by Browning in “God's in His Heaven, / All's right with the world!”³³—and what the facts of life in reality are or what they appear to be to an insatiably searching and relentlessly honest mind is the predominant theme in Leopardi's writings, the focal point to which all his moral as well as philosophical reflections and excogitations converge. That is why Leopardi's convictions have the air of incontrovertible certitude about them, which goes a long way toward explaining the masterly simplicity, poise, and perfection of his style. Truth creates its own style, said Ezra Pound, whose translation of Leopardi's “Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna” stands out among all the English and American translations of Leopardi's Canti. Hence truth and Leopardi's attitude to it determine his style as much as his extraordinary powers of expression and technique.

One of the most conspicuous features of his style and mode of expression is the exceptional degree of calm and even detachment behind them, even when he is dealing with the strongest passions and emotions. It is for this reason that some English critics of Leopardi in the nineteenth century—Charles Edwardes and H. F. Brown, for instance—compared him with Sakyamuni (the Buddha). Seekers of truth, Buddha thought, cannot attain enlightenment unless their passions are calmed. There is, one might say, a dispassionateness in Leopardi's poetry, which is a reflection or consequence of his implicit acceptance of truth, however detrimental that might be to his own peace or happiness. Even in his protestations against nature—

O natura, natura
Perché non rendi poi
Quel che prometti allor?
[Oh nature, nature
Why do you not yield afterward
What you promised then?](34)

—there is an element of stoic calm and dispassionateness that Leopardi associated with the “nobil natura,” which, like Leopardi himself,

… a sollevar s'ardisce
Gli occhi mortali incontra
Al comun fato, e che con franca lingua,
Nulla al ver detraendo,
Confessa il mal che ci fu dato in sorte.
[… that ventures to look up
Through mortal eyes to meet
Our common fate, and with truthful tongue,
Nothing subtracting from the truth,
Admits the evil lot assigned to us as destiny](35)

How many resources of strength this sickly and unhappy poet had at his command can be gauged from his unswerving devotion to and single-minded passion for truth, and from the calm grandeur and crystalline clarity of his style. Each of Leopardi's Canti manifests these qualities, but none so superbly as “Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell'Asia,” where the silence of the moon may be compared with Buddha's in the face of the unanswerable questions the shepherd—and Leopardi's mouthpiece—confronts it with:

… a che vale
Al pastor la sua vita,
La vostra vita a voi? … ove tende
Questo vagar mio breve,
Il tuo corso immortale?
Se la vita è sventura,
Perché da noi si dura?
Che fa l'aria infinita, e quel profondo
Infinito seren?
[… what is his life worth
To the shepherd,
Or your life to you? … where does it lead
This brief wandering of mine,
And your immortal course,
If life is misfortune,
Why do we endure?
What makes the skies infinite, and that infinite
Space serene?](36)

It is of the very essence of Leopardi's integrity as a seeker after truth that he not only asks these questions but also refrains from giving implausible, still less insincere answers to them. Hence the ironical drift of his supposition that what he does not know and therefore cannot answer, the moon, being immortal, might know. But in directing the irony against the moon Leopardi is in fact directing it against himself—insofar as he knows full well that the questions he is asking the moon are by their very nature unanswerable. The silence of the moon cannot be interpreted, as Buddha's silence has sometimes been, as an expression of suspended judgment; for Leopardi it is, as it were, the dumb answering the dumb, and if no answer is given, it is because there is none to give.

Leopardi's passion for truth brought him face-to-face with the unfathomable mystery of life, with the unanswerable questions concerning the universe and human destiny, and he realized, quite early on in life, that the universe is indifferent to man's ethical striving—

Non ha natura al seme
Dell'uom piú stima o cura
Che alla formica.
[Nature has no more regard or care
For the seed of man
Than she does for an ant.](37)

But his view of life “in questo oscuro / Granel di sabbia” [in this obscure grain of sand]³⁸ remained full of its moral content, that is, the values and criteria governing human conduct. Leopardi may not have said with Matthew Arnold that three-fourths of life is conduct, but he would have agreed with him that poetry, and indeed all literature, is at bottom a criticism of life, as his own writings so convincingly demonstrate. Considering man to be “in tutto il nostro globo la cosa piú nobile” [in our entire world the most noble thing],³⁹ “la principale opera della natura terrestre, o sia del nostro pianeta” [the most important work of earthly nature, that is, of our planet], Leopardi could not but interpret his position both vis-à-vis other men and the “brutto poter … ascoso” [brutal power … secret] of the universe in broadly moral terms.⁴⁰ The very connection between life with illusions and life without them, between illusion and reality, between “uom di povero stato e membra inferme” [man in poor and sickly condition] and “nobil natura” [noble nature], is by its very nature of a profoundly moral order.⁴¹ And “l'acerbo, indegno mistero delle cose” [the bitter, unkind mystery of things],⁴² with which Leopardi's passion for truth had to reckon, served only to strengthen his sense of the categorical imperatives of a moral and social life and make his need to embody them in his own daily life all the greater, even though (to quote Omar Khayyám) “tomorrow I may be / Myself with yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.”⁴³

Notes

1. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1, 411, ed. Francesco Flora (Milan: Mondadori, 1957).

2. Monaldo Leopardi, in a letter to Antonio Ranieri. Printed by Francesco Flora in his edition of Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, con una scelta di prosa (Milan: Mondadori, 1959).

3. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1:161-62.

4. Ibid., 100.

5. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 2:976.

6. Leopardi, “A Silvia,” in Leopardi, Canti. All poems cited are from this work.

7. In a letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817. See John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Clarence DeWitt Thorpe (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1935), 523-26.

8. William Wordsworth, “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality,” in Wordsworth, Complete Poetical Works (New York: Crowell, 1962), 403-6.

9. Ibid.

10. Leopardi, “Aspasia.”

11. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode,” in The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Dykes Campbell (London: Macmillan, 1893), 159-62.

12. Wordsworth, preface to Lyrical Ballads, in Selected Prose, ed. with intro. and notes by John O. Hayden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 278-307.

13. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1:488.

14. Leopardi, “La ginestra.”

15. Hardy, “He Resolves to Say No More.” See Thomas Hardy, Winter Words in Various Moods and Metres (London: Macmillan, 1928), 202.

16. Edwin Muir, Essays on Literature and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).

17. Leopardi, “Dialogo di Tristano e di un amico,” in Leopardi, Operette Morali. Essays and Dialogues, ed. Giovanni Cecchetti (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), 484-507.

18. Dante, Inferno, 15.87.

19. Leopardi, “La ginestra.”

20. Wordsworth, preface to The Excursion, 457-64.

21. Leopardi, “Canto notturno”; Wordsworth, The Prelude, 3.291, 5.301.

22. Leopardi, “Ad Angelo Mai.”

23. Leopardi, “Bruto minore.”

24. Leopardi, “Alla luna.”

25. Leopardi, “Canto notturno.”

26. Leopardi, “La quiete dopo la tempesta.”

27. Leopardi, “Sopra il ritratto di una bella donna.”

28. Leopardi, “Il tramonto della luna.”

29. Leopardi, “La ginestra.”

30. Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” in Wordsworth, 115-18.

31. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1:1169.

32. Leopardi, “Al conte Carlo Pepoli.”

33. Robert Browning, Pippa Passes, part 1 (London: Duckworth, 1898).

34. Leopardi, “A Silvia.”

35. Leopardi, “La ginestra.”

36. Leopardi, “Canto notturno.”

37. Leopardi, “La ginestra.”

38. Ibid.

39. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1:68.

40. Leopardi, “A se stesso.”

41. Leopardi, “La ginestra.”

42. Leopardi, “Le ricordanze.”

43. Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Six Plays of Calderon (London: J. M. Dent, 1948).