SOURCE: Brose, Margaret. “Leopardi's ‘L'Infinito’ and the Language of the Romantic Sublime.” Poetics Today 4, no. 1 (1983): 47-71.

[In the following essay, Brose examines the relationship of Leopardi's lyrics to the aesthetics of European romanticism in general and of the romantic sublime in particular.]

“L'INFINITO”

Sempre caro mi fu quest'ermo colle,
E questa siepe, che da tanta parte
Dell'ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
Spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
Silenzi, e profondissima quiete
Io nel pensier mi fingo; ove per poco
Il cor non si spaura. E come il vento
Odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
Infinito silenzio a questa voce
Vo comparando: e mi sovvien l'eterno,
E le morte stagioni, e la presente
E viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
Immensità s'annega il pensier mio:
E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare.

(Giacomo Leopardi, 1819)

[(1) Always dear to me was this solitary hill, (2) And this hedge, which from so great a part (3) Of the farthest horizon excludes the gaze. (4) But sitting and gazing, boundless (5) Spaces beyond that, and superhuman (6) Silences, and profoundest quiet (7) I in my mind imagine (create); wherefore (8) The heart is almost filled with fear. And as (9) I hear the wind rustle through these plants, that (10) Infinite silence to this voice (11) I go on comparing: and I recall to mind the eternal, (12) And the dead seasons, and the present (13) And living one, and the sound of it. So in this (14) Immensity my thought is drowned: (15) And the shipwreck is sweet to me in this sea.]

This appears to be a propitious moment to reconsider the lyrics of Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837). Or rather, more to the point, it is time to consider the lyric structure of Leopardi's idylls in the light of current discussions of Romanticism. For these discussions, to which Bloom, de Man, Abrams, Hartman, and the late Thomas Weiskel have made important contributions, have all been marked by an inexplicable inattention to the one Italian poet who reflected most systematically on the aesthetic of the sublime. To be sure, a number of Italian critics have given us studies which greatly elucidate our understanding of Leopardi's work, but the relationship of that work to the poetics of the Romantic Sublime, and thus to European Romanticism in general, remains undetermined.¹ Since Leopardi was not only a great poet but also a philologist, rhetorician, and critic—one who, moreover, reflected on the nature of language in terms consonant with the spirit of modern linguistically oriented stylistics—his theory and poetic practice of the sublime are of especial interest to studies of Romantic literature. What follows are the prolegomena to a re-reading of the Leopardian idillio with a close look at “L'Infinito” (1819) as a self-conscious demonstration of lyric transcendence.

I

A discussion of the Leopardian sublime permits us to circumvent a typical critical impasse: the cul-de-sac of dichotomous terminological pairs. Romantic poets lend themselves easily to classificatory dyads such as subject-object, mind-nature, poet-landscape. And this because not only do Romantic poets tend to characterize their own poetic theory in these terms, but because the reader is ineluctably drawn to a description of the moment of Romantic transcendence as a passage from one state or pole to another. The danger lies, of course, in our tendency to hypostatize these poles as mutually exclusive places: to de-linguistify, in other words, or to transfer from the domain of language to that of spatial-temporal loci. By so doing, we necessarily create binary oppositions. Rather than seek to isolate an extra-textual locus, we need to explicate the rhetorical moves involved in this intra-textual transference: the tropological shifts by which one mode of discourse is substituted for another.

In his discussion of the Romantic subject-object dyad, Paul de Man comments that whichever term is given priority by the critics, we come to a persistent contradiction. Critics are obliged, on the one hand, “to assert the priority of object over subject that is implicit in an organic conception of language.” And yet, continues de Man, if we examine theoretical passages from Wordsworth or Coleridge, we find that these poets “confer an equally absolute priority to the self over nature.” What are we to believe? de Man disingenuously queries. Is Romanticism “a subjective idealism” or “a return to a certain form of naturalism?” (de Man, 1969:182). To such a query, posed as it is in terms which are mutually exclusive, we would have to answer that Romanticism is neither. Or that it is both. Binary pairs may be useful, however, if we examine the linguistic protocols characterizing each pole. In fact, it would be possible to borrow any number of binary pairs to describe the specific nature of the rhetorical transference of the Romantic Sublime. I am thinking here of de Man's own insightful distinction between the temporality of allegory and that of irony; or the metaphoric-metonymic axes of language as formulated by Roman Jakobson; or the Saussurian algorithm of signifié and signifiant. In terms of the Leopardian lyric, we could formulate a dialectic of presence and absence—a poetics of rimembranza.

De Man's query about the nature of Romanticism quoted above concerns contradictions which surface when we consider Romantic theory and praxis as a static entity. Consider, for example, the apparently contradictory nature of these two axiomatic phrases of Wordsworth: “I have at all times endeavored to look steadily at my subject”; and “The mind is lord and master—outward sense / the obedient servant of her will” (The Prelude [1850], XII, 222-223). It is not the priority of object or of subject that concerns us, but rather the dynamic relationship between the two, which occurs only within language itself. It is, therefore, a rhetorical relationship.

Let us look for a moment at the structure of the Romantic lyric—the “greater Romantic lyric” as it is labeled by M. Abrams as the form which replaced what neoclassical critics had called “the greater ode” (the elevated Pindaric). Abrams sees the many instances of this form yielding a discernible paradigm: a “determinate speaker in a particularized … outdoor setting,” who carries on a colloquy with himself, or the outer scene, or an absent or silent human auditor. “The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; … an aspect in the landscape evokes a varied but integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling. … In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood. …” This structure, “the repeated out-in-out process, in which mind confronts nature and their interplay constitutes the poem,” is, according to Abrams, a remarkable phenomenon in literary history (Abrams, 1970:201-202). The poetic structure is actually a transcodage of this thematic interplay: in other words, the Romantic lyric resolves itself in the exchange of linguistic attitudes. Perhaps the uniqueness of the greater Romantic lyric lies in its exposure of the rhetorical transference that constitutes transcendence, for this exposure suggests that transcendence belongs to language alone and thus puts into question the ontology of both subject and object.

It is this desire to disrobe rhetorically that renders useless to our present discussion the notions of both mimetic and expressive theories of poetry. The sublime moment is located in the interstices between expression and mimesis. Or, to recall Thomas Weiskel's formulation, it is located in the breakdown of discourse itself, in the incommensurability between signifier and signified, which gives rise to a radical shift in language which transcends a merely mimetic or expressive mode of poetry (Weiskel, 1976). This breakdown is not a problem, but, rather, the solution to a problem. The Romantic lyric requires this indeterminacy of language and meaning to make possible a new meaning: the transcendental significance of the sublime.

Leopardi's “L'Infinito” adheres to the tripartite paradigm described by Abrams. What is more, Leopardi himself conceived of this idillio as a concise demonstration of the poetic sublime. “L'Infinito” actually exemplifies most aspects of Leopardi's theories of the sublime set forth in various forms throughout the numerous pages of his notebooks, the Zibaldone. In “L'Infinito” the sense of the sublime (Leopardi's indefinito or infinito) is created by a metaleptic substitution in which all spatial and temporal deictics are shifted from one mode of figuration to another. (We could also speak of this as a breakdown or transference of the referent; or as a shift from a metonymic to a metaphorical axis; or as a metaleptic reversal of absence and presence.) But let us turn now to Leopardi's own statements about the nature of the sublime.

Leopardi seems to have had a rather consistent notion of the poetic process for creating a sense of the sublime, although his several descriptions of the process appear on the surface to indicate a reversal of thought. His first theoretical statements appear in 1818, in his anti-Romanticist essay Il discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica, written before the composition of his great lyrics.² Here Leopardi defends Classicism (the ancients) against Romanticism (the moderns) on the grounds that the ancients wrote superior “affective” verse. The ancients (the true poets) achieved poetic sublimity by means of an imitation of nature in which nature becomes transumed by its linguistic encoding into a more forceful representation than it possesses in naked perception. “The ancient poets,” argues Leopardi, “imitated Nature, and they imitated it in such a way that it appeared to be transposed (trasportata) in their verses, not merely imitated.” Leopardi then claims that such imitated objects of Nature are actually more affective than real ones. “In fact, it is manifest that the most ordinary things, and especially when they are common, affect our minds and imaginations with much more force when they are imitated than when they are real” (Discorso:67).

Although Leopardi appears to be speaking from within a mimetic theory of poetry, his theory, developed and made explicit in later comments, emphasizes poetic trans-figuration. And indeed, ten years later, in the Zibaldone entries of 1828, Leopardi rejects the notion that poetry is an imitative act.

It is completely erroneous to judge and to define poetry as an imitative art, to place it along side of painting, etc. The poet imagines [imagina]: the Imagination sees the world as it is not, fashions for itself [si fabbrica] a world which does not exist, creates [finge], invents [inventa], but does not imitate … a creator, an inventor, but not an imitator; this is the essential character of the poet

(Zib., II:1182-83; August 1828).³

In the Leopardian lexicon, verbs such as fingere, immaginare, fabbricare, inventare all describe the rhetorical act of substituting the infinite for the finite, memory for the present, the sublime for the ordinary. Neither mimetic nor expressive theory locates the origin of this process in language's illusion-making power. But Leopardi understood this well. In fact, Leopardi triumphs-over a paradoxical adherence to both a mimetic and an expressive theory of poetry in his Discorso by adopting a Vichian resolution: Leopardi posits a “poetic imagination” of primitive man in which mimesis is primarily a rhetoricization or transpositio of nature into language.

Like Vico's first men, Leopardi's ancients were inherently poetic because they were ignorant. They had free reign of the fantasy because they lacked reason, which, like the super-ego, could censor and subordinate their imaginative capacities. The ancients were blessed with illusion. For Leopardi, the powers of reason and the imagination are antithetical and inversely correlative: the more extensively reason sees, the less precisely it can see (“ella tanto meno vede quanto più vede,” Zib., II:183; July 1823); the more powerful reason, the more impotent the reasoner (“ma ella [Ragione] è dannosa, ella rende impotente colui che l'usa, è tanto più quanto maggiore uso ei ne fa,” Zib., II:182; July 1823). So too, reason and nature are opposed (“la ragione … è nemica formale della natura … dove la natura è grande, la ragione è piccola,” Discorso:26).

The ancients, blissfully ignorant, thought themselves intended for happiness by nature and ascribed to nature a teleology. Their fall from this edenic state was due to man's desire to know the truth. Reason, according to Leopardi, reveals the meaninglessness of life and its merely random patterns, and the illusion of illusion. Not only does Leopardi recount this drama of Genesis in his “Storia del genere umano,” the first of the ironic prose pieces of the Operette morali,⁴ but he also posits it as the representative anecdote of his own poetic iter (“In my poetic career, my soul has followed the same path as that of Mankind in general,” Zib., II:161; June 1820). It is a passage from the domain of the imagination to that of reason, from poet to philosopher. Or, we might add, it is a passage from a metaphoric to a metonymic linguistic axis. Leopardi's poetic career does evince, in fact, the Vichian anamorphosis of the tropes. The task of the poetic, for Leopardi, is to reverse by metalepsis that inevitable passage. The structure of metalepsis as a poetic strategy also provides the model for the relationship between Leopardi's early piccoli idilli and his later grandi idilli in that the latter idylls attempt to re-figure the more metaphoric experience of the first period.⁵

In his Discorso of 1818 Leopardi likens the ancient poets to childhood: “that which the ancient poets were, we have all been, and that which the world was for several centuries we have all been for several years—that is to say, children.” As children, Leopardi continues, we, like the ancient poets, “were active participants in a world of ignorance—of fears and pleasures and hopes”—and above all “in the infinite workings of the Imagination [fantasia]” (Discorso:20). The reappropriation of that earlier mode of fantasia (later designated by Leopardi as illusion) becomes the source of the sublime in poetry: a return to the state of consciousness in which the first men had to invent or figure [fingere] the meaning of the world, because everything was mysterious and sublime (Discorso:21). By this same rhetorical process [fingere] Leopardi invents the “infinito” in his famous eponymous lyric. This reappropriation is only possible by means of the memory [rimembranza] of a childhood illusion which, despatialized and detemporalized, metaleptically returns inviolate. The return is also an illusion—(“the poet is the artificer of illusions,” Discorso:57)—a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, but one which provides in the textual actuality of the poem the presence and plenitude that life denies.

II

Central to the Leopardian conception of the sublime is the notion of the indefinite (l'indefinito, Zib., I:1202; October 1821)—the conviction that true poetry evokes the indefinite, and is syntactically and semantically grounded in the vague (il vago, with the Italian connotation of the beautiful). The content of indefinite apprehensions of reality derives from childhood illusion, brought back to consciousness through memory. Poetic language seeks to emulate primitive language: de-reifying, we might say, it seeks to dispel a purely fictitious clarity which modern language imposes on our experience of the world in order to put us in touch not with “reality,” but with a childlike apprehension of it.

Now, this notion of poetry as dealing in the indefinite is certainly consonant with most theories of the sublime, from Longinus through Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Hugh Blair, and so on, the writers who had preceded Leopardi in the discussion of the sublime. The Zibaldone attests to Leopardi's careful reading of Longinus, and in terms consonant with περί υψους Leopardi perceived that orators and poets seek different means to achieve their different ends. Poetic power is identified with the domain of the affective (il patetico), while that of the orator is the plausible. It is for this reason that the poet's image must be obscure or indefinite while that of the orator must be clear and precise. Leopardi, assimilating the sensation of indeterminacy to that of the sublime, postulates a condition of blockage or obstruction as prerequisite to the creation of the sense of the infinite. Like Burke, Leopardi recognized that when the eye is blocked, the imagination is liberated to envision that which Nature denies—the vast, the vague, the infinite.⁶ This is so, Leopardi states, because “man's desire for the infinite” is innate and irrepressible, and when the imagination has free rein it will inevitably figure forth infinity (Zib., I:187; July 1820). The sense of the infinite can only be attained, however, as a projection against the finite, in opposition/apposition to the hic et nunc. Such is the Leopardian valorization, albeit ironic, of the utility of the present. This dialectic of the bound and the unbound posits a moment in limine, a threshold state when perception, limited, becomes disfunctional and before imagination assumes control. Here the Leopardian metaleptic substitution occurs. This return to a past mode of figuration is one of several alternatives open at the liminal moment: Eugenio Montale's early lyrics, for example, exploit the epiphanic potentiality of the concrete objects of liminality. However, Leopardi's infinity is material in nature, without a trace of the Montalian noumenality, and objects of the hic et nunc can never be epiphanic.

From this nexus of the indefinite, the infinite, and the sublime, Leopardi elaborates a theory of the poeticity of language itself. He classifies the lexicon into two basic categories, termini (terms) and parole (words) (Zib., I:135-137; April 1820). Scientific and philosophical languages deal in terms which present a univocal idea of a given object or concept: these termini fix meaning and delimit semantic flexibility. Parole, conversely, do not present a precise idea of an object, but are polysemic and call up clusters of images that, by virtue of their indefiniteness, suggest the infinite and the sublime.⁷ When a given language has a preponderance of termini it becomes incapable of poetic expression. Such was the condition, Leopardi thought, of the French language of his time. It was, in his view, a language which de-sublimated experience.

Parole, poetical words as Leopardi describes them, are, I would suggest, semantically metaleptic. Such words not only refer literally to indeterminacy in a spatial or temporal sense; they necessarily depend upon a leap backward (and forward) for any poetic signification whatsoever. To adopt contemporary semiotic terminology, we might say that Leopardi perceived not only the distinction between the signifier and the signified as prime elements of the sign in which they are united, but that he saw parole as signifiers possessing an overabundance of signifieds. Parole are the mark of true poetry; semantically metaleptic, their indeterminacy makes them susceptible even to future semantic permutations, and thus they possess that “eternal” quality which is to be found in the language of all great poetry.

Leopardi believed that in ancient languages words were charged with endless signification; the ancient poets signified many things with one word, rather than using many words for the same thing. All ancient lexemes were therefore semantically infinite and indefinite. The proliferation of synonyms in modern languages suggested to Leopardi a decline in meaning. The lexicon passes, we might say, from an original condition of pure “metaphoricity” to one of “metonymicity”: an endless accretion of terms linked, finally, by contiguity alone. What many of his contemporaries viewed, then, as the progress of civilization, Leopardi envisioned as merely the progressive restriction of consciousness, specifically the desiccation of the imagination. The growing precision of our language for describing the world is attended by the growing apprehension of the world's essential nullity. Synonymy is the death of difference. The expansion of reason (and thus termini) effects a semantic reduction, in the same way that the filling out of the map of the world resulting from the age of exploration necessarily destroyed the field where imagination at an earlier time could write: “Here be monsters.” In a canzone written in 1820, “Ad Angelo Mai,” Leopardi reflects on this cartographic analogy in a verse on the expedition of Columbus:

Ecco svaniro a un punto,
E figurato è il mondo in breve carta;
Ecco tutto è simile, e discoprendo,
Solo il nulla s'accresce. A noi ti vieta
Il vero appena è giunto,
O caro immaginar; de te s'apparta
Nostra mente in eterno; allo stupendo
Poter tuo primo ne sottraggon gli anni;
E il conforto perì de' nostri affanni.

(vv. 97-105)

[Now they (our dreams) have vanished in an instant, and the world can be outlined on a small sheet of paper; Now everything is the same, and by these discoveries only Nothingness has increased. O dear Imagination, at the advent of Truth you are lost to us; Truth separates forever our spirit from yours; the passage of time removes us from your once stupendous power; and thus has perished the only consolation for our woes.]

Leopardi's own brand of Romantic Irony takes the form of asking the reader to help him perform a rhetorical sleight-of-hand by which the apprehension of metaphysical absence would be turned into the illusion of presence.

Leopardi's theory of the sublime and poetic of the indefinite are grounded in his view of man's insatiable desire for pleasure. Man's desire for pleasure is limitless (and Leopardi equates pleasure with happiness and happiness with illusion—there is no credence in a morally informed condition of happiness). Frustration is thus inevitable, for there is no infinite object with which this desire could be united and endless pleasure thereby attained. Yet man's imagination permits him to conceive of things which do not exist in reality, and to imagine that infinity which an insatiable desire for pleasure presupposes. The imagination can do this by “figuring” a pleasure which is limitless in one of three ways: in number, in duration, in extension.

Let us turn now to man's desire for the infinite. Independently from the desire for pleasure, there exists in man an imaginative faculty, which can conceive of things that do not exist, and can imagine them in ways that do not obtain for real things. Considering man's innate drive towards pleasure, it is natural that one of the principal occupations of the Imagination should be the imagining of pleasure … and the Imagination can represent [figurarsi] pleasures which do not exist at all, and it can represent them as infinite: 1) in number, 2) in duration, 3) in extension

(Zib., I:183; July 1820).

Although this, too, is in perfect accord with numerous earlier treatises on the sublime, Leopardi is echoing here a sensationist psychology, and more specifically, that of Locke. For Locke, the idea of infinity is actually derived from sensation: the mind extrapolates from empirical experience the sensations of space, duration, and number, and then reconceptualizes these in terms of an endless repetition (Locke, 1975:II, 17). When combined with the notion of the human being as a creature of insatiable desire, this idea of the sensationist origin of the infinite results in an elevation of imagination over reason as the faculty which saves us from despair by the production of illusions. The object of desire and thereby the occasion of the feeling of pleasure is always spatially and temporally elsewhere than the ostensible locus of the poetic discourse; but the object of desire can be magically transposed, i.e., rhetorically transumed into the poetic text by means of the poet's manipulation of the human capacity to hope and to remember.

Pleasure is never in the present. Only the hope for future happiness or the remembrance of past happiness can approximate that condition of the infinite which is correlative to happiness. In fact, Leopardi ironically concludes, happiness itself is the most unhappy moment of life.

The remembrance of pleasure can be compared to hope, and produces almost the same effects. Like hope, remembrance is more pleasing than pleasure itself … and one can conclude that the most miserable moment of life is that of pleasure or of enjoyment

(Zib., I:702; May 1821).

The dynamics of this transference of desire is explicated in one of the Operette morali, the “Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare.” Here Tasso's genius explains that pleasure is constituted by desire alone, and that during any one ostensible moment of pleasure, there exists a truer, latent pleasure: the expectation of a future greater pleasure. Pleasure derives from a continuous transference to the future moments of the same delight.

Pleasure is a speculative subject, and not something real; a desire and not a fact; a sentiment of which man conceives with his thought, but does not experience; or, rather, a concept and not a sentiment. Do you not realize that during the very moment of your delight, even if it is infinitely desired, and obtained by indescribable labor … you are expecting a greater and truer enjoyment, in which that pleasure really consists; and you are always continuously transferring yourself to future moments of the same delight? … For pleasure is always past or future, but never present

(O. M.:90).

Pleasure is always either past or future, but never present. Such is this Derridian différence of desire, forever displaced or deferred, accessible only by the re-evocation of another (putative) moment of pleasure which also eludes our grasp. We should remember that there is absolutely no hint of the transcendental in any of this; there is no teleology in nature, no ontological reality to infinity. Our desire for the infinite is not implanted by God to bring man's thought from nature to nature's Creator; the sublime is not proof of man's immortality. According to Leopardi, our desire for the infinite is actually a desire for “an infinity of material pleasures” (una infinità materiale, Zib., I:194; July 1820). Man is condemned to live, think and desire only within the limits of a purely physical universe. This universe, according to Leopardi, is mere matter forever decomposing and recomposing. And in a Pascalian vein, albeit without the consolation of religion, Leopardi conceived of man's grandeur as precisely his ability to recognize his insignificance in the face of an immense and ateleological universe. Within this Leopardian anti-topia, the apotheosis of rimembranza is the only viable alternative to despair.

By 1829, Leopardi explicitly equates the poetic and the sublime throughout the Zibaldone (Zib., II:1300; April 1829). Leopardi then posits remembrance as the axial concept for his poetics of the sublime. Images of the vast and the beautiful elicit the sensation of sublimity because they evoke our most remote memories, those of childhood, when the indefinite was ubiquitous and when we believed in the advent of happiness (Zib., II:1321; May 1829). The poetic consists only in memory.

Remembrance is the essential and principal element in poetic sentiment if for no other reason than because the present, no matter what it may be, can never be poetic

(Zib., II:1237; December 1828).

Our adult experiences of the infinite and of the sublime are inextricably tied to childhood memory. Our adult image-making, then, is a sort of déjà-vu, or better still, a metaleptic return of these earliest illusions. The image is re-presented.⁸ Memory, mimesis, and poetic invention are thus bound together in a complex symbiotic relationship. Memory is an imitation (a transfiguration) of a past sensation, and subsequent remembrances are imitations of prior remembrances. Thus Leopardi tells us, “memory imitates itself” (Zib., I:1098; September 1821). Man necessarily imitates while he is inventing—or, continues Leopardi, he imitates his invenzioni with other invenzioni. Man's imaginative capacity is limited in the sense that it can only transfer (in the etymological sense of μετάpορα) remembered images into a present. It re-tropes, by metalepsis, a prior figuration (the rimembranza, itself invention or illusion) into a present figuration. But according to Leopardi's mythology, the figurative (linguistic) potentiality of that Edenic anteriority is limitless in nature.

Leopardi's conception of memory is thus more complex than Wordsworth's “emotion recollected in tranquility.” For, like Petrarch, Leopardi's true precursor, Leopardi understood that memory and desire are the source of all poetic figuration. However, Leopardi recognized in a way that Petrarch could not, that behind any memory was another figuration; and that that other figuration was itself a repetition or doubling; and thus, that the poetic image was the very spirit of the letter that Petrarch had sought.

III

Infinity, wrote Leopardi, “is an optical illusion” (Zib., II:1126; September 1827). What is infinite, he continues, however, is thought; and thus, we might add, it is the linguistic protocols which encode thought that provide us with the sensation of the infinite. This Leopardi intuited: two years after writing “L'Infinito” he described it as a poem which demonstrates the production of the experience of the sublime by means of contrasts between the finito and the indefinito (Zib., I:953; August 1821). The contrastive structure of the lyric, recognized and variously described by most critics of Leopardi,⁹ involves not only an alternation between two fields, one visual and one imaginative, but more importantly, a substitution of one for the other. This is a metaleptic substitution, made possible within the perimeters of the 15-line lyric by means of a reversal of deictics.

Metalepsis may be defined heuristically here as a trope or figure of thought—a strategy—as distinguished from figure of speech. Metalepsis is the trope which takes substitution (the literal meaning of μετάληψις) of one word for another, one meaning for another, one mode of figuration for another, etc., as an end in itself. It does not presuppose any specific structure of relationships or hierarchy between words, or between sign and referent (metaphor, for example, presupposes the notion of similarity as a valid mode of relation; metonymy, that of contiguity). Metalepsis presupposes an other of some sort, thus engendering a dialectic of presence and absence.

Quintilian (1976:VIII, vi) describes metalepsis (Latin transumptio) as the trope which provides a transition from one trope to another. He writes:

It is the nature of metalepsis to form a kind of intermediate step between the term transferred and the thing to which it is transferred, having no meaning in itself, but merely providing the transition.

Metalepsis has no semantic meaning in the way metaphor, for example, does; metalepsis is a strategy of transition in discourse and effects its own operations, a self-consuming trope. Metalepsis means, therefore, that some mode of figuration, of perceiving or knowing the world, is insufficient and that another mode is needed for resolution (psychological, epistemological, or rhetorical). It signals a problematic relation to the present and to presence, a need for avoidance, evasion, deferral, coupure. It signals rupture and recovery of discourse by means of displacement of word, thought, or affect. Metalepsis, the logician Chaim Perelman (1969:181) tells us, is a trope by which we can substitute one mode of argumentation for another, especially in those discourses whose aim it is to facilitate “the transposition of values into facts” or the attribution of “a certain behavior to some remembered phenomenon.”

Above all, however, metalepsis permits us to wrestle with the past, to form a bridge or continuity with it, to transform priority into acceptable presentness, absence into figurative presence. If we wish to suggest a rhetoric of the psyche, as Freud often did, we would call metaleptic the way in which the Unconscious slips into Consciousness: the way in which some childhood memory, repressed and returned, is transformed into the experience of the uncanny. It is because metalepsis is the bridge between one mode of figuration and another that Harold Bloom (1975:74) fondly calls it “the trope of a trope”; it is an allusive scheme “that refers the reader back to any previous figurative scheme.”

Bloom's “map of misreading” presents a paradigm of the Romantic lyric which is at once rhetorical, psychological, and cognitive, with a six-phase process, each phase of which features a different trope of figuration. The paradigmatic Romantic lyric, he argues, begins in irony (the trope of the interplay of absence and presence in consciousness) and ends in metalepsis (the trope of substitution of the early for the late and the late for the early) (Bloom, 1975:84; 1976:ch. 14). Since all great Romantic lyrics deal with time and death, metalepsis is necessary for that bridging of the gap between origin and end, the poet and his predecessors. Only by metalepsis can we reverse temporality and make the present vanish. For, Bloom (1975:103) concludes,

metalepsis leaps over the heads of other tropes and becomes a representation set against time, sacrificing the present for an idealized past or a hoped for future.

Rimembranza and speranza are the cathodic poles of the Leopardian poetic also, to which the present must succumb if the sublime is to exist at all.

Of course, metalepsis understood strictu sensu is also a specific figure, localizable on the surface structure of the text. And in Bloom's system it is primarily that: one trope only of a six-phase progression. But in terms of the Leopardian corpus, metalepsis would describe the underlying poetic strategy by means of which the affective (always other) can be activated within the presence of the text; the substitution of an absent plenitude for a present void.

The present, according to Leopardi, can never be imbued with sublimity. Yet the Leopardian idillio typically opens with the denomination of specific natural objects pertaining to the hic et nunc—the idyllic landscape—thus suggesting a fullness and a plenitude. However, we immediately recognize that these objects are valued not in and for themselves, but only inasmuch as they function as signs pointing beyond themselves. They refer to a priority—the hypostatized original moment of plenitude in the past. Signs in Leopardi (objects, words, sensations, memory) all refer to something absent; the present reveals only ubiquitous transience. As in Leopardi's dual personal and social mythology, these traces indicate a loss of Edenic presence. But there is never an unmediated experience of that presence; there are only desires for and memories of such a condition.¹⁰

The very first line of “L'Infinito” signals the impossibility of an unmediated present. The allusion to the topographical identity of the solitary hill (Mt. Tabor) thrusts the speaker back into childhood reveries. The poem unfolds with a metaleptic gesture back to an anteriority and an origin: a prior mode of figuration and affect. The opening line immediately initiates this complex interplay of temporalities: the first word (sempre) conveys an indeterminate continuity and atemporality which is juxtaposed to the central word in the line, the aorist fu indicating a completed, time-bound distant action. These two modes of temporality are conjoined in the present by means of the pronomial indicator mi and the demonstrative adjective questo. The indefinite (sempre) and the past (fu), both axial to the Leopardian sublime, are transfigured in a spatial and temporal presence (questo) which otherwise would have been an affective absence. This metaleptic leap depends upon Leopardi's careful control of deixis.

Deixis, the linguistic category of spatial-temporal indicators (Jakobson's “shifters”), is described by Emile Benveniste (1971:218-19) as forming a specific linguistic class, because these markers do not refer to reality or to objective positions in space or time. They refer “to the utterance, unique each time, that contains them.” Benveniste illustrates this with a discussion of the pronomial pair I-you, which also lacks objective referents; this pair refers only to a reality of discourse. The pronoun I can only mean, therefore, “the individual who utters the present instance of discourse containing the linguistic instance I.” This is true, Benveniste continues, for deixis in general: deictics “delimit only the spatial and temporal instance coextensive and contemporary with the present instance of discourse containing I.” Thus, according to Benveniste, deixis constitutes

an ensemble of empty signs that are non-referential with respect to reality. These signs are always available and become full as soon as a speaker introduces them into each instance of discourse. Since they lack material reference they cannot be misused. … Their role is to provide the instrument of a conversion of language into discourse.

Leopardi intuitively grasped this conversional power of deixis. This is all the more remarkable given his theory of the sublime as residing in the indefinite. We ought to expect his poetry to be devoid of deictics, and yet the idilli contain an overabundance of these spatial-temporal markers. Their quantitative weight signals their qualitative importance as a major stylistic device. Leopardi uses a deictic reversal to convert the affectively empty present into the fullness of the remembered (i.e., re-figured) past. Not only are deictics empty signs, but so are all the putatively real objects described in a Leopardian idyll, as I have already suggested—they all function as signifiers without signifieds. The Leopardian natural object has no intrinsic meaning: the hill (colle) is significant only insofar as it is reappropriated by memory; the hedge (siepe), only insofar as it is a boundary to be transcended by the imagination. But all these signs become full when the speaker's animus participates in the localizing and temporalizing act of converting language into discourse. The poem itself, then, is the locus of the conversion of the finite into the infinite. Rather than a dichotomy between subject and object, what we see is a text which serves as the arena for the speaking subject to activate the latent potentialities in a series of empty signs.

Even on its most basic semantic level, “L'Infinito” is a calmly delineated prescription for the experience of the sublime. It is a precisely articulated progression of contrasts and juxtapositions, from the visible and bound to the limitless and infinite. The speaker's eye moves from hill to hedge to an inward imagining of infinity beyond, the poetic faculty liberated at last by the blockage (how importantly does the verb esclude figure here). The speaker conceives of an infinite space in plural terms, “as an endless succession of spaces beyond spaces,” to quote Renato Poggioli (1962:277). Then, the speaker shifts from the intuition of limitless space to that of limitless time, and this eternity is also envisioned in plural terms as the superhuman silences of the universe. This epiphanic vision almost fills the speaker with terror. He compares the infinite silence with the ephemeral rustling of the wind. From this comparison he shifts by metalepsis to a remembrance of eternity—a shift to a prior mode of figuration—and from eternity back to the present season. This is the reverse of that progression we noted earlier, from the sound of the wind (1. 9) to the infinite silence (1. 10): finite r infinite. Now we move from the eternal (1. 10) to the present season (1. 13): infinite r finite. The progression reverses itself around the remembrance (1. 11, “mi sovvien”), which is a metaleptic reappropriation of an affective presence. The actual present is experienced as mere trace (the voice of the wind, the sound of the present season). This vertiginous alternation of presence and absence permits a conflation of time and space into the image of a sublime sea of immensity in which the poet sweetly drowns. And yet, there is no mystical delirium, no rape of the senses here. All the affective, visual, auditory, and imaginative operations within “L'Infinito” are fully consonant with Leopardi's theories cited above. The poem illustrates with great precision how the infinite can be derived from physical sensation (figuring it “limitless in number, duration, and extension”). The poem progresses through a geometrical pattern of concentric circles which, by successively larger alternations of memory and imagination, exponentially leaps beyond the very confines of time and space. The progression is programmatic, and the lyric has often been called an itinerarium mentis in infinitum.

The structure of the poem progresses by a metaleptic reversal of the spatial deictics and by a reversal of time-frames. The first three lines of the lyric form one unit containing two deictics (1. 1, “quest'ermo colle”; 1. 1, “questa siepe”). They are markers of a temporal, spatial present, but one which is affectively empty, as if in suspension. So too, the suspension of the proposition until the verb esclude at the end of 1. 3 corroborates the spatial attenuation semantically indicated as “da tanta parte / Dell'ultimo orizzonte” (11. 2-3). The second section of the poem, lines 4-13, is introduced by the adversative conjunction Ma. This marks more than a grammatical break (although it is noteworthy that 1. 3 is the only end-stopped line in the poem). The conjunction Ma is, on the syntactical level, a sign of opposition and blockage, just as the “hedge” is on the imaginative level. It is a rhetorical and affective swerve into an interiority. The intransitive gerunds “sedendo e mirando” (1. 4) signal this suspended temporality; a processual state of liminality, a durée beyond chronological markers.

The syntax and cadence of the second section are markedly lengthened, replicating the durational quality of the gerunds. The three adjective-substantive pairs (“interminati/Spazi,” 11. 4-5; “sovrumani/Silenzi,” 11. 5-6; “profondissima quiete,” 1. 6) precede their verbal phrase (“Io nel pensier mi fingo,” 1. 7), thus suspending the closure of the line. The polysyllabism of the three adjectives contributes to this lengthening. In each of the three cases, the adjective precedes its substantive so that affect rather than essence is stressed. The enjambements of the first two of these pairs transcend the metric boundaries of these semantically indefinite and phonetically protracted words. This sense of suspension and cosmic awe is fostered by dieresis (“qui-e-te,” 1. 6; “spa-u-ra,” 1. 8).

The radical break at the conjunction Ma is strengthened by a deictic. In line 6 the demonstrative quella is syntactically and semantically ambiguous, able to refer to either “da tanta parte” (1. 2) or “questa siepe” (1. 2). But the overall linguistic structure of the poem indicates that quella refers to the hedge, which was earlier marked by questa. This is a metaleptic substitution, in which a once present object is spatially and temporally distanced. The abstract interior figuration—the poet's fingere (1. 7)—has supplanted the specific natural scene first described: the infinite obliterates the finite.

There is another inversion, between lines 9 and 11, one which at first seems like a return to the spatial-temporal loci of the opening description. The wind rustling through these plants (“queste piante,” 1. 9) is compared to that infinite silence (“quello / Infinito silenzio,” 11. 9-10). Again, apparently, the infinite is abstract and distant, the landscape concrete and near. But in fact, as the powerful lexeme “voce” (1. 10) suggests, the present is affectively absent: as we have seen, the elements of the landscape are reduced to signs such as memory (the hill), boundary (the hedge), or trace (the voice of the wind). Leopardi masterfully manipulates an auditory sensation to indicate the ephemerality of the present.¹¹ The present can only be appropriated as the experience of passage and dissolution. This inversion recurs—inversely—in the appellation of the present season as sound (“il suon di lei,” 1. 13). The long enjambement of “quello / Infinito silenzio” (11. 9-10) gives phonetic weight to the infinite, while “questa voce” (1. 10) is syntactically and rhythmically neutral. The syntax of this entire section is attenuated by means of polysyndeton. There are no subordinate clauses and the lyric floats in an oneiric continuum.

The aulic gerund of line 11, “vo comparando,” describes the contrastive structure of the poem, itself a series of similes. The juxtaposition of infinite and finite, of silence and sound, recalls to Leopardi (“mi sovvien,” 1. 11) the eternal, the dead seasons, the present season and its sound. The movement seems to progress from abstract to concrete, but the concrete is revealed to be an illusion, graspable only through memory, and the present has form only as vestigium.

The third and last section of the poem, lines 13-15, signals the definitive triumph of the imagined over the real, the final displacement of the present. In this section, the two deictics signifying “this”—“questa / Immensità” (11. 13-14) “questo mare” (1. 15)—indicate an immediate present, but their referents have undergone a metaleptic substitution: these deictics now designate the imagined infinite realm. The “incommensurable, inaudible, and invisible,” to borrow again from Renato Poggioli's discussion of “L'Infinito” (1960:277), now becomes the only presence in the poem. The symmetrical alignment of “tra queste piante” (1. 9) and “tra questa / Immensità” (11. 13-14) reinforces the efficacy of this final deictic reversal. These parallelisms suggest that the poem moves upon a chiastic pattern and that all the inversions we have noted converge upon a central axis.

The axis is centrally located with regard to the form of the lyric (lines 7 and 8 of the 15-line poem), as well as to the content, that is, it corroborates that the metaleptic substitution which engenders the sublime is the product of the linguistic capacities of the speaker (“il nel pensier mi fingo,” 1. 7). The power of this imaging of the sublime instills a rupture, an almost-loss of self, the linguistic breakdown. It is the affective center of L'Infinito, “over per poco / Il cor non si spaura” (11. 7-8). The powerful lexeme “spaura” is followed by the poem's first true caesura. At the outermost perimeters of the lyric we find the only two other affective syntagmas, which undergo a metaleptic exchange at this center, radiating out in a chiastic pattern. In the first line: “caro-mi-fu-questo-colle”; in the last line: “mi-è-dolce-questo-mare.” Not only does the temporality radically alter (aorist to present of essere: fu r è), but the two adjectives, caro and dolce (so typical of the intimate lexicon of the Leopardian idillio) are almost identical semantically and syntactically, but joined to two diametrically opposed realms: the specific hill and the abstract sea of sublimity. Presence and absence are now suddenly metaleptically reversed.

There is a masterful phonetic paranomastic play in this pattern. Or perhaps we should employ Kenneth Burke's terminology for this type of formal recurrence. Burke (1957:298) speaks of an “acrostic” structure of alliteration, where a sequence of consonants or vowels reappears in a scrambled order. What we actually find in “L'Infinito” is a phonetic chiasmus between the first and last lines:

This phonetic chiasmus is intensified by the euphonic recurrence of ar in the last line: “naufragar […] mare”; as well as its inversion in the virtual center of the poem's central line: “spaura.” It recurs again (in an extended form conflating ar ＋ ra) in the key verb denoting the poem's structure: “comparando” (1. 11). This complex euphonic exchange permits, simultaneously, two other patterns to emerge. We have on the one hand, a structural homology:

caro: colle:: dolce: mare

and, on the other hand, a virtual affective identification of hill and sea, of finite and infinite:

colle=mare.

In the poem's central section another phonetic chiasmus instantiates the Leopardian sublime: the process of sensation becoming memory while metaleptically reversing itself. Between the acrostic alliteration of “vento” (1. 8) and “eterno” (1. 11)—both substantives symmetrically placed at the end of their respective lines—we follow the progression of “voce” to “vo comparando” to “mi sovvien”: a chiastic reversal of vo x ov, in which sensation through memory is refigured as infinite. These phonetic recurrences not only emphasize a relationship obtaining between the words which contain them but also, and more importantly, confirm a sense of closure made possible by the reader's compliance in the linguistic exchange.¹²

This same process is revealed when we trace the progression of the four first-person pronominal indicators (mi) in the poem:

Again, by means of a chiastic movement, the past is re-figured through memory and returns to inhabit the presence of the poem. This trajectory has also been noted by the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti. Ungaretti comments that in the first section of “L'Infinito,” a remembrance returns to make a visual sensation alive (to make the hill “dear”), whereas in the second section, by means of a “process which reverses that of the first part,” a live auditory sensation, the sound of the wind, leads back to memory.¹³ This ebb-like motion from memory to sensation and back again is fully consonant with Leopardi's empiricist notion that our concept of infinity is derived from the duration of material phenomena.

This substitutionary pattern of memory and sensation is reflected in the meter of “L'Infinito,” which is endecasillabo sciolto—a metric system of lines of eleven syllables without a fixed rhyme scheme, but usually with a regular stress pattern. But Leopardi has so manipulated the actual rhythm of his poem that it approximates free verse. The polysyndeton, enjambements, dieresis, synaloepha (the elision of adjacent vowels), and assonance work together to create a continuous melic flow. So too, the absence of hypotactical constructions and the long series of coordinated copulas (as for example, 11. 1 and 2, “quest'ermo colle / E questa siepe”; 1. 4, “sedendo e mirando”) open up the poem's metric form. Thus the actual stress-patterns of the poem reinforce the parallelisms and reversals of the questo/quello deictics. In fact, in a detailed analysis of the rhythmic structure of “L'Infinito,” Giuseppe Sansone (1970:337) has revealed a highly balanced pattern of accentuation—a “symmetrical bilaterality”—which actually constitutes a chiastic accentual exchange.

The chiastic affective transformation which occurs in the poem's center is intensified by the repetition and reversal of the substantive “pensiero” in two key phrases. In line 7 we have “Io nel pensier mi fingo”; and in line 14, “s'annega il pensier mio.” In the first instance the poet carefully controls the figurative capacity of his thought, whereas in the second, the poetic figuration controls the poet. This, of course, is Leopardi's intention. The structural recurrence is now a chiastic reversal:

thought: poet:: poet: thought.

“L'Infinito” closes, then, with the apotheosis of the poetic figuration.

The tripartite structure of “L'Infinito” has been noted by many of Leopardi's best critics.¹⁴ What is more, several contemporary critics of Romanticism discern a tripartite structure as the paradigm for lyrics of Romantic transcendence. In his study of the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Harold Bloom (1976:404) designates these three moments as poetic “crossings,” and describes the three stages as follows: 1) “a dialectical movement of the senses, usually between sight and hearing”; 2) “a movement of oscillation between mimetic and expressive theories of poetic representation”; 3) “a movement toward an even greater degree of internalization of the self, no matter how inward the starting point was.” These crossings are, for Bloom, the transition from trope to trope; they are achieved by what I would call metaleptic leaps.

These three phases are also delineated in Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime. Weiskel calls the first phase the mind “in a determinate relation to the object and this relation is habitual, more or less unconscious.” In the second phase, “the habitual relation of mind and object suddenly breaks down.” This second phase is characterized, according to Weiskel, by a sense of astonishment, and by a disproportion between inner and outer. “Either mind or object is suddenly in excess.” And, Weiskel concludes, in the third phase of the sublime, “the mind recovers the balance of outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object such that the very indeterminacy which erupted in phase two is taken as symbolizing the mind's relation to a transcendent order.”¹⁵ So too, Marjorie Hope Nicolson (1959:321) in her study on the aesthetics of the infinite discerns “a threefold process” in the experience of the sublime. And since “L'Infinito” has been referred to as an itinerarium mentis in infinitum, we should recall that St. Bonaventura's itinerarium mentis in Deum is also a conversional progression in a tripartite structure.

We could easily explain the affect of “L'Infinito” by adopting Leopardi's own terminology. The poem is brief—what he called a canto or short lyrical flow. The infinite is called forth from a visually blocked landscape, almost, we might say, as a counter-image produced by the retina (the “optical illusion” referred to by Leopardi himself). The lexicon consists primarily of parole—words which are themselves antique, indeterminate, poetically suggestive (sempre, ermo, ultimo, interminati, sovrumani, profondissima, etc.). Leopardi also favored as inherently poetic the juxtaposition of these parole to more common and concrete substantives (colle, siepe). Leopardi noted that the sky's horizon and the sea are the two most important archetypal topoi for the evocation of the sublime (Zib., I:1165; October 1821). We witness the process by which rimembranza reappropriates the past (childhood illusion) and refigures it as the sublime. “L'Infinito,” in short, fully exemplifies Leopardi's theories of the indefinite, childhood, remembrance, and the sublime.

What is remarkable in all this, however, is that Leopardi's perceptions are so consonant with contemporary stylistics, as well as with traditional treatises on the sublime. In terms of lexis, for example, we should note the preponderance of hyperbolic terms in “L'Infinito”: terms of excess and extreme, superlatives. Hyperbole, according to Longinus (1935:139, 101-103), is, along with anaphora and hyperbaton, one of the crucial figures for the sublime. And according to Harold Bloom (1975:73), it is the most important trope for the Romantic Sublime. It is the trope of excess and finds its imagery in height and depth (Leopardi's sky and sea). In Bloom's view, hyperbole is aligned with the psychic defense of repression, and, he notes, “the glory of repression, poetically speaking, is that memory and desire have no place to go in language except up onto the heights of sublimity” (1975:100; my italics). Leopardi's great insight was that this sublimity was the gift of language itself.

Whereas the specific temporal indices of “L'Infinito” undergo a metaleptic substitution, we could speak of the overall temporality of the Leopardian idillio as a form of diachrony. This mode is best described by Paul de Man as the temporality of allegory. The temporal structure of allegory, according to de Man (1969:203, 206-207), involves successive stages of consciousness, “one belonging to the past and mystified, the other to the now of the poem, the stage that has recovered from the mystification of a past now presented as being in error.” The poem presents this demystification as a temporal sequence: the difference does not occur within the subject (which is a unified self in the poem) but is instead “spread out over a temporality.” Irony, according to de Man, has an opposite structure to that of allegory. In irony, the difference “resides in the subject, whereas time is reduced to one single moment.” Irony is the mode of the present: “It knows neither memory nor prefigurative duration, whereas allegory exists entirely within an ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless future. Irony is a synchronic structure, while allegory appears as a successive mode capable of engendering duration as the illusion of a continuity that it knows to be illusionary.” Allegory, comments de Man, always implies “an unreachable anteriority.” That anteriority is, for Leopardi, a mystified conception of childhood and its mode of prelapsarian consciousness.

We could describe the early Leopardian idillio as resulting from compensating and attempting to compensate for this allegorical mode of temporality. It seeks, in other words, to reverse by metalepsis this successive demystification and to return to a previous unified moment of non-error, of presence. The early idilli attempt to negate their inherent diachrony by reappropriating the poetic images of purely fictive prior time-frame. But the anteriority is unreachable. There are only displacements through memory to images of that image.

The later Leopardian idillio (the grandi idilli) suggests that the moment of the first idilli might be poetically constituted as that hypostatized anteriority. For, if all we have is an infinite series of displacements, one of those displaced images might serve as the illusion of anteriority. Here the speaking subject does not try to replace the present with the notion of a prelapsarian plenitude, but rather fills the poem with his allegorizing of the simultaneous insight into the disparity between life's emptiness and his own earlier mystified vision of fullness. Here memory serves not to re-figure the past, but to allegorize it as error or illusion (inganni, errori, illusioni).

The last Leopardian poems, the great odi and canzoni of the 1830's (from the ciclo di Aspasia to “La Ginestra” in 1836) exhibit a structure of temporality more akin to that of irony. Irony, according to de Man (1969:203), “divides the flow of temporal experience into a past that is pure mystification and a future that remains harassed forever by a relapse within the inauthentic.” Here the difference between error and truth is not allegorized as successive, but is coextensive with the present of the speaking subject. The speaker understands the illusionary nature of all origin and closure. What is first conceived of as merely deferred is now recognized as forever other. Life's truth, this condition of boredom, pain, and, finally, death (noia, dolore, morte), is unmitigated by hope or remembrance, or even by the bittersweet pleasure of allegorizing. Leopardi's last lyrics signal the ironic acceptance of presence as image or trace and the contingent nature of all life. The last poems function, then, as the de-mystification of the idilli. The synchrony of the ironic temporality abrogates any possibility of illusion, including the rhetorical illusion on which the experience of the Romantic Sublime is based.

Notes

1. See, among others, such classic early studies as Croce's essay on Leopardi (1946) and De Sanctis (1925). An analysis of the idillio alone is presented by Figurelli (1941). Among critics who discuss the “binary” nature of the Leopardian corpus (aside from the Crocean “poesia e non-poesia” distinction), see Binni (1971) and Bosco (1965). On Leopardi's philology and his cultural milieu, see Timpanaro (1955; 1969). I found the most provocative study of Leopardi's Canti to be that of Bigongiari (1976).

2. Leopardi (1970). All subsequent quotations are from this 1970 Capelli edition, referred to hereafter as Discorso.

3. Leopardi (1967). All subsequent quotations are from this 1967 Mondadori edition, referred to hereafter as Zib.

4. Leopardi (1951:7-22). All subsequent quotations are from this 1951 Rizzoli edition, referred to hereafter as O. M.

5. It is interesting that Leopardi ascribes this passage in his own life to a neurological crisis, when in 1819 his sight failed him (Zib., I:162; July 1820). Deprived of sight, he was forced to abandon all hope. This transition from hope to memory, then, so axial to Leopardi's poetics, is connected to the operation of the visual faculty. Thus, Bigongiari's apt denomination of the ottica leopardiana to describe the permutations of the idillio (1976:267-377).

6. Burke (1909, II, iv). For a discussion of the Leopardian sublime in relationship to other theories of the sublime, see Perella (1970). Blockage in terms of the sublime should be understood, of course, as visual, psychological, and rhetorical at the same time.

7. This adherence to the concept of the indefinito recalls the theories of Edgar Allan Poe, although in practice Poe and Leopardi are strikingly dissimilar. It also seems to anticipate Mallarmé's famous dictum: “Nommer un objet, c'est suprimer le trois-quarts de la jouissance du poème qui est faite de deviner peu à peu: le suggérer voilà la rêve.” Leopardi also prescribes that images and relationships be merely “suggested” (Zib., I:1275; November 1821). But if we may speak of both poets employing a dialectic of presence and absence, it should be stressed that Leopardi never aspired to a Mallarmean linguistic transparency but, rather, to the opacity of language as a surrogate for the density of presence which life denies. See, for example, Leopardi's notion of the multiplicatory power of metaphor (Zib., I:1482-83; June 1822).

8. It is only in this sense of doubling that Leopardi speaks about seeing “correspondences,” or a second order of things. In a famous passage in the Zibaldone Leopardi speaks of seeing the world and objects first with the eyes and then seeing reduplicated by the imagination the same phenomena (“il mondo e gli oggetti sono in certo modo doppi,” Zib., II:1200-31; November 1828). This notion does seem to anticipate certain tenets of Symbolist theories of poetry. But Leopardi does not suggest—as do Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, etc.—that these are correspondences between a physical and a spiritual order. Rather, for Leopardi, things exist poetically only insofar as they can be re-figured. Leopardi's notion is more austere and cynical than Wordsworth's concept of the “two consciousnesses” (a landscape is seen, then its remembered image is superimposed upon the landscape re-visited). This double awareness of things as they are and as they were carries, in the later Leopardi, the bitter apprehension that things “as they were” can only have been an illusion.

9. Among other critics who discuss “L'Infinito” as contrastive, see especially Bigongiari (1976:253-265); Dolfi (1973); Herczeg (1962:321-365); Sansone (1970); Ungaretti (1943).

10. At first glance, the speaker in a Leopardian idillio appears to exhibit what de Man has called “the nostalgia for the object” (1970:69-70): the desire, in Romantic poetry, for language to possess the ontological status of the natural object. Language, continues de Man, is capable of endless origination, but can never have an ontological foundation. And yet, it is “the absolute identity with itself that exists in the natural object” which for Leopardi constitutes the object's delimiting nature. Ironically, the speaker in the Leopardian idillio exhibits instead a nostalgia for language, in that he would wish upon the present object the infinite open-endedness of consciousness. Leopardi's last poems, however, are marked by the absence of all nostalgia for ontological priority of either object or word.

11. See also the contrapuntal (metaleptic) use of the song of the artisan and the clamor of the Roman Empire in “La Sera del di dì festa.”

12. Bigongiari (1976:87) describes another pattern of phonetic chiasmus in “L'Infinito”: the repetition and reversal of the io sound; the hammering insistence on the first-person singular speaking subject which underlines the purely mental or, if you will, linguistic foundation of the sublime. This neatly fits Bigongiari's major contention (1976:28) that the entire Canti form a chiasmus around the variations of the “desiderio dell'io”: canzoni-odi: primi idilli = grandi idilli: odi-canzoni.

13. Ungaretti (1950:19-22). Ungaretti goes on to note that eternity is only “a memory, and thus the past”, and that the present, accessible only through memory, “is already dead.” Thus, the sweet sea of sublimity is the most grotesque of ironies—it is actually “the sea of the finite, of nothingness.” “L'Infinito” is, according to Ungaretti, “an ironic idyll”—it is actually a representation of the finite. Ungaretti, a poet committed to a Christian notion of the resacralizing power of language, viewed the Leopardian solution of the rhetorical illusion of infinity as an anathema, and yet, it was the spectre which haunted Ungaretti's own poetry.

14. Among the critics who delineate a tripartite structure in “L'Infinito” see especially De Sanctis (1925:126); Ungaretti (1943:227); Bigongiari (1976:87-88); Dolfi (1973:75). Both Bigongiari and Dolfi see this typical Leopardian tripartite movement as involving a chiastic reversal in the center phase (the chiasmus may be conceptual, rhetorical, psychological, or phonetic).

15. Weiskel (1976:23-24). Weiskel's study posits a distinction between a “metaphorical” or negative sublime, and a “metonymical” or positive sublime. The “metonymical” sublime—that of Wordsworth, and of Leopardi too I suggest—results from an excess of signifieds within the mind of the poet. This causes a breakdown of discourse. The recovery of discourse is effected by a displacement of this excess of signifieds onto a dimension of contiguity (spatial or temporal). This version of the sublime exhibits, according to Weiskel, Jakobson's famous “contiguity disorder.” We should remember at this point that Leopardi's notion of parole might also be characterized in terms of an excess of signifieds.

References

Abrams, M. H., 1970. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in: Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton).

Benveniste, Émile, 1971. Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: Univ. Miami Press).

Bigongiari, Piero, 1976. Leopardi (Firenze: La Nuova Italia).

Binni, Walter, 1971. La nuova poetica leopardiana (Firenze: Sansoni).

Bloom, Harold, 1975. A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford UP).

———, 1976. Wallace Stevens, The Poems of our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell UP).

Bosco, Umberto, 1965. Titanismo e pietà in Giacomo Leopardi (Roma: E. De Sanctis).

Burke, Edmund, 1909. On the Sublime and the Beautiful, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: Collier).

Burke, Kenneth, 1957. The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Random House).

Croce, Benedetto, 1946. Poesia e non-poesia (Bari: Laterza).

de Man, Paul, 1969. “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in: Charles S. Singleton, ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP).

———, 1970. “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in: Harold Bloom, ed. Romanticism and Consciousness (New York: Norton).

De Sanctis, Francesco, 1925. Studio su Giacomo Leopardi, ed. Raeffaele Bonari (Napoli: Alberto Morano).

Dolfi, Anna, 1973. Leopardi tra negazione e utopia (Padova: Liviana).

Figurelli, Francesco, 1941. Giacomo Leopardi, poeta dell'idillio (Bari: Laterza).

Herczeg, Giulio, 1962. “Premesse teoriche per un'interpretazione stilistica della frase leopardiana,” in: Leopardi e il Settecento, Atti del I convegno internazionale di studi leopardiani (Firenze: Olschki).

Leopardi, Giacomo, 1951. Le Operette morali, ed. Mario Oliveri (Milano: Rizzoli).

———, 1967. Zibaldone di pensieri, V. I and II, ed. Francesco Flora, 2nd ed. (Milano: Mondadori).

———, 1970. Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica, ed. Ettore Mazzali (Bologna: Capelli).

Locke, John, 1975. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch Oxford: Oxford UP).

Longinus, 1935. On the Sublime, ed. and trans. W. Rhys Roberts (London: Cambridge UP).

Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 1959. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell UP).

Perella, Nicolas James, 1970. Night and the Sublime in Giacomo Leopardi (Berkeley: California UP).

Perelman, Chaim and Obrechts-Tyteca, L., 1969. The New Rhetoric (Notre Dame UP).

Poggioli, Renato, 1962. On “L'Infinito” in: Stanley Burnshaw, ed. The Poem Itself (Cleveland/New York: Merridon/World Publishing).

Quintillian, 1976. The Institutio Oratoria, trans. H.E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard UP).

Sansone, Giuseppe, 1970. “La struttura ritmica dell' Infinito,” Forum Italicum 4, 331-337.

Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 1955. La filologia di Giacomo Leopardi (Firenze: Le Monnier).

———, 1969. Classicismo e Illuminismo nell'Ottocento italiano (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi).

Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 1943. “Immagini del Leopardi e nostre,” Nuova Antologia 78 (16 febbraio), 221-232.

———, 1950. “Secondo discorso su Leopardi,” Paragone 10, letteratura, 3-35.

Weiskel, Thomas, 1976. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP).