Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), the greatest Italian
poet since Dante, loved what is not
directly given in life. Born to minor
aristocracy in a sleepy backwater of the Italian Marches,
Giacomo preferred study in his father's enormous library
to the normal pleasures of youth. By 22 he had mastered
seven languages, translated the classics, written a treatise
on astronomy and composed a long poem in ancient Greek.
His learning
outstripped the tutors engaged to prepare him for the priesthood,
and indeed that of most scholars. The self-styled 'walking
sepulchre' came to despise
the consolations of religion, to compose satiric fables,
and to periodically fall in love with women who hardly
noticed him. When eventually allowed to visit Rome,
he was profoundly disappointed, travelling in the years
afterwards round the larger cities of Italy as the guest
of a wealthy liberal elite who genuinely admired the literary
productions but were treated to scornful
comment. Leopardi became increasing eccentric in his
dress, behaviour and eating habits. Nearly blind at the
end, his ill-health exacerbated by excessive study. Leopardi
died in Naples of an asthmatic attack.
Leopardi's achievement
The Romantic
hero, presented with rumbustious humour in Byron's Don
Juan, and more cynically in Pushkin's Eugene
Onegin, becomes in Leopardi a man fixated on the lost
and distant. But if despairing, the poetry was often beautiful.
Leopardi incorporated words or phrases from earlier poets,
but he vitalized his meaning by scrupulous attention to
sound and rhythm while employing the simplest of vocabularies.
Informed
by extended scholarship, the poetry has the restraint and
clarity of classical literature. And although a life seen
as pain and boredom, with only futility
in supposing otherwise, was not
unexpected, though possibly debilitating,
it allowed Leopardi to concentrate on his shadow world of
'solid nothingness'. The cornerstones were remembrance and
infinity, and through these Leopardi opened the door to
modernism's divorce from social obligations, to a poesie
pure that anticipated the Symbolists.
His best
known works are To
Sylvia (an elegy on a peasant girl struck down in the
bloom of youth), poems in OperrataMorali
(poetic fables exemplifying Leopardi's philosophy of despair)
CantiandPensieri
(short meditations in the manner of Pascal).
