Giacomo Leopardi
June 29, 1798 — June 14, 1837 — Italy
Giacomo Leopardi is considered the greatest Italian poet of the modern era — a figure comparable to Keats in the tragic brevity of his life and the incandescent quality of his lyric verse. Afflicted from childhood by a spinal condition that left him physically deformed and in chronic pain, he produced, from a small provincial town in the Papal States, a body of philosophical poetry and prose so profound that it is studied alongside the greatest European Romantic writers.
The Prison of Recanati
Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi was born on June 29, 1798 in Recanati, a small hill town in the Marche region of the Papal States (now central Italy). His father, Count Monaldo Leopardi, was an aristocratic conservative with a large private library; Giacomo essentially educated himself in it with extraordinary ferocity. By his early teens he had taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Spanish; by seventeen he had written works that philologists initially refused to believe were by a student rather than an established scholar. The physical cost was devastating: his obsessive studying from childhood deformed his spine, and he suffered progressive ill health, poor eyesight, and constant pain for the rest of his life. He was largely confined to Recanati, which he experienced as a prison despite his love for its surrounding landscape. His anguished desire to escape was the emotional engine behind much of his greatest poetry.
The Canti and Philosophical Pessimism
Leopardi's major poetic works are collected in the Canti — a cycle of lyrics written across his adult life. Poems like "L'infinito" (The Infinite), written around 1819, achieve in a few lines something close to perfect: a mind resting on the imagined edge of the infinite and finding in it not terror but a kind of ecstasy. Other great poems — "La sera del dì di festa," "A Silvia," "Il sabato del villaggio" — are suffused with his central philosophical themes: the gap between human longing and human possibility, the indifference of nature to human suffering, the peculiar pain of hope itself. His philosophical prose dialogues, collected as Operette Morali (Little Moral Works), are satirical, grim, and brilliant. His private journals, the Zibaldone — some 4500 pages — are one of the great thinking notebooks in world literature. His poems in translation reward careful reading.
Did You Know?
"L'infinito" — one of the most celebrated lyric poems in any European language — is only fifteen lines long. Leopardi wrote it at approximately twenty years old while reclining on a hillside above Recanati looking at a hedge that blocked his view of the horizon; imagining what lay beyond the hedge became the poem's content. The poem is so embedded in Italian culture that it is one of the most memorized texts in Italian schools, like a national incantation against finitude.
Last Years and Legacy
Leopardi finally escaped Recanati in his late twenties and spent his last years in Rome, Milan, Florence, and finally Naples, in the company of his great friend Antonio Ranieri, who cared for him as his health failed catastrophically. He died in Naples on June 14, 1837, at thirty-eight, of heart failure exacerbated by years of illness. His reputation, somewhat suppressed in his own time, grew enormously in the twentieth century. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Leopardi are now typically grouped together as the three great European philosophers of pessimism, though Leopardi's pessimism is always transfigured by the beauty of his verse into something more ambiguous than defeat.