SOURCE: King, Martha, and Daniela Bini. Introduction to Zibaldone: A Selection, translated by Martha King and Daniela Bini, pp. xiii-xxii. New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

[In the following essay, King and Bini provide an overview of the composition of Leopardi's multivolume record of his thoughts on poetry and philosophy.]

Giacomo Leopardi, the author of this collection of thoughts, this hodge-podge or medley, as the Italian word Zibaldone signifies, was beginning to win renown as a precocious young philologist when the three poets whose names are identical with English romantic poetry took up residence in Italy. In fact, Byron, Shelley, and Keats came to Italy between 1816 and 1820, during the crucial years of Leopardi's intellectual development, the years of his “conversion” [143-144] (Numbers correspond to Leopardi's pagination in the Zibaldone.) to poetry which would eventually make him not only Italy's greatest poet of the Romantic period, but one of the greatest poets of Italian literary history.

Of the three English expatriots, Leopardi had heard only of Byron, whose fame preceded his arrival, and which became even more widespread as word of his physical, amorous, revolutionary, and literary activities got around. It was Byron's poetry, particularly The Giaour, that one Italian romantic, Ludovico di Breme, touted as the great exemplar of modern poetry—modern in its invention of new myths, its freedom from traditional forms, and its predilection for the melancholy tone. The praise lavished upon Byron's poetry moved the young Leopardi, a devotee of Greek and Latin poetry, to defend the classical equilibrium, craftsmanship, and rules, and to regard modern poetry over emotional and affected. [Zibaldone 15-21]

After years of study in the isolation of his father's extensive library, the young Count Leopardi revised his estimation of the illustrious English lord's poetry, and deemed The Giaour symbolic of a new force roaming the European literary landscape which was the antithesis of Greek restraint and suggestiveness. This revision coincided with Leopardi's developing sense of poetic vocation, The Giaour providing an exemplary model of a new poetics.

In 1823, Leopardi wrote in his Zibaldone: “The only poetry suitable for our time is the melancholy, and it is the only poetic tone possible for every subject.”[3976] Such modifications of his thought are what give interest and value to these notebooks, and in this case indicate his reluctant acceptance of the unavoidable shift in nineteenth century poetic sensibility.

Leopardi was nineteen when he began making notes in his Zibaldone (July or August of 1817) to record images, words, and ideas for his poetry and prose, to jot down his etymological explorations, to develop his philosophical speculations, to clarify his thoughts. He continued writing in it over the next fifteen years, as he resided in Rome, Bologna, Pisa, Florence, after finally escaping from his restrictive family life in Recanati. The last entry is dated December 4, 1832, seven years before his death in Naples, though most of the Zibaldone was written between 1819 and 1823, the years of self-examination and philosophical speculation.

In 1819, after a period of poetic inspiration and production, in which the thriving force was his fantasy, Leopardi became in his own words “filosofo di professione” (philosopher by profession) [Zibaldone 144]. A temporary illness kept him away from books and he began to reflect on human suffering and on his own. It was during this period that he realized the impossibility for modern man to recreate the naive poetry of the ancients, after reason had produced a fracture between man and nature. Just as Schiller had done in 1789, Leopardi came to the conclusion that only sentimental, that is, philosophical poetry was now possible; this poetry was nurtured by the discovery of the opposition between the poetical I and nature, the other. “Sentimental poetry belongs exclusively to this century, just as the true and simple imaginative … poetry belonged exclusively to the Homeric age … the sentimental is based upon and rises out of philosophy, experience, knowledge … in other words, out of the truth, whereas the primitive essence of poetry was to be inspired by falsehoods.” [Zibaldone 734-5]

Though poetry and poetics were his main concern, Leopardi's speculations did not slight any field of human enquiry. The crisis of poetry coincided with the development of man and society, and therefore with human progress. In criticizing the naive trust in scientific and social progress of his day, Leopardi was in line with much contemporary thinking. If the Operette morali are the accomplished realization of such criticism and the Pensieri the apodictic statement of it, the Zibaldone was the place of its birth, growth, and full development

Rapidly, in the attempt to keep up with the complexity of his thoughts (hence a reliance on etceteras to indicate their unfinished state), or without always bothering to form complete sentences, in an informal style often laced with colloquialisms, he recorded the journey of his mind. At times, however, this journey was arduous, and the issues at stake obscure, as his thoughts unfolded in long and complex sentences. Leopardi recorded his ideas in the process of their being born; thus the complexity of his style mirrored the movements of his mind.

From an unusually early age he explored and defined a variety of subjects, including astronomy, superstition, history, philosophy, in carefully written, scholarly essays. But he needed a vehicle for expressing his own ideas, a place to record poetic images as they spontaneously came to him, a repository for the thoughts he wanted to mull over as they occurred during his wide and constant reading in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and modern European languages.

Few poets have left such a complete record of the matter which sparked their creativity. Leopardi's meditations on the creative process and his statements on style and the psychological effect of certain words are a rare testimony of a great poet. The letters of Keats, the criticism of Eliot, Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads are equally illuminating, but nowhere else is the dramatic development of a creative artist so well documented as on these 4526 pages. Aesthetics and poetry are Leopardi's life-long concern, since art—and poetry in particular—are for him the only solace for life's suffering.

From the first publication of the Zibaldone in 1897 these notes have been read as a key to his poetry: critics have combed these pages for clues to explicate his poetic themes. For a long time, however, they also dismissed his most complex reflections on ethical and social issues as pedantic and disorderly, in the attempt to arrive exclusively to the heart of his poetics. Only in the last few decades have scholars begun to value the philosophical weight of Leopardi's thought and to see it not as a hindrance to his poetry, as the leading voice of Italian aesthetics Benedetto Croce had affirmed, but as its conditio sine qua non. In fact, with his philosophy of “distinti,” (strict separation of mental faculties), Croce was the cause of the long-lasting misinterpretation of Leopardi. Philosophy and poetry, as products of different mental faculties, could not coexist, but were mutually exclusive to Croce. Therefore a philosophical poet was a contradiction in terms. Of Leopardi's extensive works, Croce sanctioned only his lyric poetry, the “Idylls” and rejected everything else, especially the Zibaldone.

The resistance to recognizing the presence of a real philosophy in Leopardi's work also had another cause: the longtime tradition in Western thought, from Aristotle to Hegel, that had established the identity or coincidence of philosophy with systematic thought. At its basis there was, of course, a faith in the readability of the world, in the existence of stable and immutable principles by which every human and natural phenomenon could be explained. Only recently scholars who nurtured their thoughts on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud, were able to re-read Leopardi and discover in the asystematic quality of his thoughts not the lack of a philosophical mind, but the trait of a modern philosophical mind akin to those of the philosophers just mentioned.

After spending a lifetime on the study of Greek philosophy, Emanuele Severino, one of Italy's leading contemporary philosophers, turned to Leopardi and wrote the first of a two volume study on his thought, which he defines as the core of Western philosophy that opened the path to modern man (Il nulla e la poesia. Alla fine dell'età della tecnica: Leopardi.)

The fragmentary quality of the Zibaldone must therefore be seen as Antonio Prete remarked, as a statement about the impossibility of the Opus, of the final, definitive work, given the absence of final answers and absolute truths (Il pensiero poetante). The only possible philosophical work is always recreating itself, questioning everything that has previously been done. The Zibaldone becomes the anti-philosophical opus, where the traditional division of philosophy into ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics has been destroyed. Metaphysics is defeated by a materialistic view of the world where everything is reduced to matter and from which the spirit has been banned forever. Ethics and aesthetics are now intertwined since the source of pleasure can be found only in illusions, thus in man's own creations.

The foundation of Leopardi's world view, upon which all his suppositions are based, is his theory of pleasure derived from the French sensationalists and materialists of the eighteenth century (Condillac and La Mettrie above all). Pleasure is what everyone seeks but never finds, because we do not want a particular, short-lived pleasure; we want pleasure that lasts forever. The responsibility for this unhappy necessity lies with Nature that has given her creatures the everlasting need for pleasure and happiness without the means of achieving it (because nothing in the world is infinite or limitless). She has, however, granted him illusions—of love, glory, virtue—that can only give him a temporary, precarious happiness, for reason's task is to destroy these illusions. Leopardi, in fact, soon becomes aware of the contradictory character of illusions whose power lies precisely in their nonbeing. Were they to be realized, they would necessarily cease to be ideals, illusions, and thus lose their essence. The ideal exists only insofar as it is not realized.

The final logical and bitter conclusion of these thoughts is that life is composed of nothing but suffering, which makes death the preferable and only reasonable alternative.

Leopardi dramatized his interrogations of reality by dividing every issue into antitheses: Nature and Reason, Pleasure and Pain, Happiness and Unhappiness, Existence and Nothingness, Life and Death. These dichotomous entities comprising his “philosophy” or “system” (as he called these theoretical passages) are “the incompatible and irreconcilable elements of the human system”[1982]. No synthesis is possible.

In his scheme Nature plays a large part and has more than one role. On the one hand she is responsible for all suffering, illness, misfortune; but “nature” also refers to the enthusiasm, intuition, poetic spontaneity belonging to the ancients, children, and the naive. Reason, nature's opposite, represents intellectual coldness and analysis. Reason is the progenitor of progress that causes undue suffering, but that must nevertheless be pursued as the moral duty of modern man.

These same antitheses are at work in his poems; in fact, the very opposition between the real and the ideal is their inspiring and propelling force. In his poetry the painful philosophical truths he had discovered in the Zibaldone are metaphorically rendered through images that temper the polemic tone present in his prose: the moon over a desert, the morning rain on the roof, a quiet evening after the festivities of the day have ended, muffled sounds at night of a lovely young woman working at her loom. The stony harshness of his philosophical conclusions is often softened by a bitter-sweet nostalgia. A nostalgia for times past—for the simpler, naive (that wisdom lies in ignorance is one of his paradoxes) life of those who were innocent of civilization spawned by reason, and for youth and beauty which, in the sorrowful nature of things, is always momentary. His great “Idylls” (as he called them), and numerous poems making up the Canti share the image of youthful beauty (Silvia, the woman in the Dream, Aspasia, Nerina) that soon fades and dies, symbol of the precariousness and brevity of the ideal. Behind the illusory world is the irrefutable bedrock of nothingness and indifference to individual existence.

In one of his final poems, La ginestra, Leopardi suggests the possibility of hope in this absurd existence, perhaps the only reasonable one to expect—hope in feelings of confraternity. The image of a broom plant—a rugged yellow blossom on a long broom-like stem that grows wild in the Italian countryside—represents stubbornly resistant life at the edge of a volcano that will certainly destroy it. The appearance of Mount Vesuvius, reminiscent of Sade's description of erupting Etna in La Nouvelle Justine, represents nature's irrational destruction that leaves man facing a vast desert. The broom symbolizes the individual who “takes all men as his allies, and men / Embraces in deep love” (trans. Ottavio M. Casale) and no longer blames them for his suffering for which Nature alone is responsible.

The germ of this poem is in a passage of the Zibaldone written years earlier and serves as an example of how Leopardi's desperate philosophy is sublimated, and thus rescued by its poetical transformation. In this passage he defends himself against the accusation of misanthropy when he writes that his philosophy does not foster hatred for mankind, but it “makes nature guilty of everything, and excusing men completely, directs the hate, or at least the lament, to the highest principle, to the true origin of the evils of existence …”[4428].

The Zibaldone.gives the readers of Leopardi's poetry and prose a rare look into the mind of a great poet: a great poet and a moralist, an advocate of illusions and an advocate of nothingness, a man of sensibility and a man of reason. This work is untidy with inconsistencies, complexities, and repetitions, but fearless in following a thought to its logical conclusion. As the poet created himself, in the Keatsian sense, he went from a kind of residual faith in Christianity, to an anguished declaration of the nothingness of everything, a philosophical nihilism that refuses all solace and accepts only desperation. Hence the truly heroic position that comes to terms with the inevitable loneliness and emptiness of this life and finds in man's creative power the only means to cope with life's evils. Leopardi was able to look squarely at human life—short, difficult, often painful, often boring—as few have done. He understood both the harshness of reality and the human need to mask that harshness with illusions. But above all he discovered man's superiority in his capability to create Beauty, Happiness, and Immortality in his world of fiction.

It is ironic that one so opposed to the desperate heroism of The Giaour and other Promethean protagonists of the romantics would so resemble them in his psychological make-up. A certain heroism is achieved by refusing the illusory comforts that most men seek. “Man would be omnipotent if he could be desperate all his life, or at least for a long time: that is, if his desperation were a condition that could endure”[4090]. It was the relatively inexperienced, relatively untraveled Leopardi, with few friendships and loves to claim, physically weakened and misshapen by years of persistent study, who took a solitary, heroic position against the refuge of hope and illusion, and the expectation of pleasure and happiness—in effect much like a brooding Giaour or Manfred.

Yet Leopardi was not a poet only for his time. It is no coincidence that philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche praised him above other poets of the romantic age. His insights about the risk of dehumanization that modern civilization and technology provoke (Operette morali), his reflections of the dialectical principles of life—thought and action—bring him into the twentieth century and set him side by side with Pirandello, Musil, Svevo, and Montale.

Furthermore, Leopardi contributed to contemporary thought the discovery of the cognitive power of the imagination. Tearing down the barrier between poetry and philosophy, he saw them working together toward the discovery of new truths as well as toward the creation of art. At the center of the Operette morali stands “Il Parini,” a didactic composition whose importance lies in the character of Parini, the eighteenth-century Italian poet and philosopher. Parini “was … one of the very few Italians who, in addition to literary excellence, possessed depth of thinking and great familiarity with contemporary philosophy.” (Trans. by G. Cecchetti) The ideal modern poet is he who is endowed with a philosophical mind, that is, he who seeks out truth. In a parallel way the true philosopher is he who is endowed with “eccellente ingegno” (greatest intelligence), but also with “ardentissimo cuore” (warmest heart). The latter truth is delivered by the authority of Filippo Ottonieri the philosopher who taught “that the most real pleasures in life are those produced by false imagining.” (Cecchetti). In these two compositions Leopardi had two illustrious speakers repeating and summarizing what he had been reflecting on in so many pages of the Zibaldone, and it was not by chance that the praise of philosophy was undertaken by a poet and that of poetry by a philosopher. Philosophy and poetry must proceed together because they depend upon each other. “You can be certain,” Parini says, “that subtlety of intellect and great power of reasoning are not enough to make substantial progress in philosophy; great power of imagination is also necessary.” And he concludes that “both poet and philosopher penetrate the depths of human nature and bring to light its innermost qualities and moods, its hidden emotions and impulses, and its causes and effects.” (Cecchetti) Only a year earlier Leopardi had written in his notebooks: “It is as astonishing as true that poetry which by its very nature seeks out the beautiful, and philosophy which by its very essence seeks out the true, that is the very opposite of the beautiful, are the closest faculties … poetry and philosophy are equally at the summit of the human spirit.” [3382]

In making our selections we have tried to choose passages that reflect the variety of thought sketched above, while keeping in mind the important fact that the Zibaldone should facilitate the understanding of his literary works. And with the conviction that biography is useful when it can illuminate the reader's imagination, we have included passages that reveal the poet's personality, such as the well-known description of his strict, narrowly religious mother, Countess Adelaide Antici [353-356]. It increases our overall understanding to know that he liked solitude [670], that he was a faithful friend [4274], that study and creativity were the single absorbing joys of his life [4417], and yet that he felt regret for the other pleasures of life that he missed because of these pursuits [4421].

We have made a large selection of his observations of his own method of creating a poem, and his opinions about the psychological effects of certain words and images. Not only did he have an abiding interest in the origins and meaning of words, but he was highly sensitive to their emotional effect, just as he was to suggestive sights and sounds [1744], and he analyzed these effects carefully. Leopardi states repeatedly that words selected for their many associative meanings set up reverberations of memories that go back to childhood, as do sights when they recall other scenes, and sounds when muffled or diffused. His important division of words into termini and parole is a prelude to modern linguistic theory.

Using examples from other poets' work (Petrarch in particular) and his own, he writes that the words a poet chooses should be vague as well as suggestive, to allow the reader to expand the poem's meaning within his own range of experience [1701-1706, 2054]. In addition, particular images may arouse the pleasurable sense of infinity that extends one's mental vision and can produce a transcendental experience [185, 1430]. His poem L'infinito exemplifies this supposition.

Well over a third of the notebook entries deal with his constant preoccupation with the tools of his craft, words. However, we have included none of the etymological or philological passages, as we felt that, although brilliant, they would not be of general interest.

In Leopardi's comments on the creative act of writing poetry, students of English literature will recognize similarities to another English poet. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth wrote that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility …” Quite unaware of this famous statement of nineteenth century poetics, Leopardi writes of the enthusiasm that is necessary for the conception of a poem, but which can be “actually harmful” for its execution. “Often we can best create at that moment following an enthusiasm of a powerful emotion when the soul, though quiet, sways like an undulating sea after a storm and recalls the experience with pleasure.”[257-259].

It is Leopardi the poet-philosopher who speaks in the Zibaldone, no matter what the subject, couching his thoughts in metaphor and simile, ever conscious of the imaginative language forming those thoughts. The paths of reasoning recorded in this book give form to his poetry and prose, and recognition of this creative reciprocity gives an undeniable value and importance to the study of this work.