Leopardi’s atheism has always been and remains a contentious issue. It has been condemned, denied, and vindicated in equal measure. This volume of essays is the first in English to address the issue directly by examining the development and complex nature of Leopardi’s atheism in the context of the religious beliefs as well as the atheism of his age. There are chapters on the shift in his writings from religious believer to atheist, from an early draft of ‘Christian hymns’ to the later draft of a hymn to Ahriman, god of evil, and on the biblical language Leopardi continued to use in fashioning his first-person voice; on his empiricism, materialism, and relativism, key philosophical themes of significance to religious belief; comparative chapters on Leopardi and Shelley, who was in many ways a kindred spirit, and on Leopardi and the religious revival in Germany through the filtering lens of Madame de Staël; and finally a chapter on Cesare Luporini whose critical studies have been a focus for contemporary debate on Leopardi’s atheism. The first English translation of Leopardi’s satire I nuovi credenti, written in response to the revival of philosophical spiritualism in Naples, appears in an Appendix. Leopardi’s distinct identity as a poet-philosopher has attracted a good deal of attention in Italy although he is virtually ignored outside Italian culture. In the last 20 years he has been increasingly recognised as a key figure of modern western culture, as witnessed by the number of translations of his notebooks, the Zibaldone di pensieri. This study of Leopardi’s atheism appears alongside a new complete English translation of the Zibaldone. It provides, from the perspective of his atheism, an understanding of the complexity and intellectual lucidity of his thought and of the questions all his writings continue to pose for 21st-century readers.

There have been few attempts to render the sublime poet of Italian literature into English as of the last few decades, but none have been able to best Frederick Townsend's 1888 translations. The languor, the rhythm and the syntax is versified with intelligence and sensibility, while the depth of the abandon unto the ennui of a prescient amor fati is nuanced with deft and stress. On the merits of Leopardi I have already spoken in previous reviews, but suffice it to say for those that have yet to become acquainted with the Italian poet, classist, philologist and philosopher of the 1800, the crass analogy of liking him to a Wordsworth with the cadences and concision of a Keats may be useful; whereas for those more familiar with German literature you may well make the claim, as absurd as these may be, that he is similar to Holderlin, in a similar fashion given to a riddled existential angst, while intimating the dismal distress that only Nietzsche was since apt to give voice to, yet Leopardi's "pessimism" (beware those of you who adopt this term without responsible and adequate insight) is more akin to Shopenhauer. No literarary intellecual or lover should go without experiencing Giacomo Leopardi, a man who in spite of his avowed atheism and consonent hopelessness was as spiritual as any poet has ever dared to be. Upon the first edition of Townsend's translation of the Italian Lyric genius, O. Brook Frothingham observed in its preface that "Giacomo Leopardi is a great name in Italy amoung philosophers and poets but is quite unknown in this country." Why the English have yet to embrace this poetic genius 120 years later is a topic well worth discussing, especially so because in France, Germany, and Spain he has been received with the highest interest and esteem. Whaereas he may be classified yet as a Romantic poet by the English readership he would never be branded as such elsewhere. Leopardi poses questions and allows them to lyrcally dissolve into a peculiar angst-ridden beauty; he quantifies the infinite and disenchants the illusive tendencies of human nature while eulogizing them by means of an elegy; Leopardi reflects on language and tradition with an astute picturesque dissonance; he labours through the disquiet of a melancholy spirit while wrestling with an absent divinity. It is a hybrid beauty that depicts cantos as if Giorgio De Chirico were absorbed by Edvard Munch. And most astounding is the fact that from this monster comes beauty as pristine as any modernity has been able to compose.

These translations of the major poems of Giacomo Leopardi (1798--1837) render into modern English verse the work of a writer who is widely regarded as the greatest lyric poet in the Italian literary tradition. In spite of this reputation, and in spite of a number of nineteenth-and twentieth-century translations, Leopardi's poems have never "come over" into English in such a way as to guarantee their author a recognition comparable to that of other great European Romantic poets. By catching something of Leopardi's cadences and tonality in a version that still reads as idiomatic modern English (with an occasional Irish or American accent), Leopardi: Selected Poems should win for the Italian poet the wider appreciative audience he deserves. His themes are mutability, landscape, love; his attitude, one of unflinching realism in the face of unavoidable human loss. But the manners of the poems are a unique amalgam of philosophical toughness and the lyrically bittersweet. In a way more pure and distilled than most others in the Western tradition, these poems are truly what Matthew Arnold asked all poetry to be, a "criticism of life." The translator's aim is to convey something of the profundity and something of the sheer poetic achievement of Leopardi's inestimable Canti.

This book traces the life of Giacomo Leopardi by examining four different yet interrelated aspects: his social origins and class in relation to his evolving conception of nobility; the mixture of idealism and misogynism in his attitude toward women and in his conception of love; his poems and prose on the theme of Italian independence; and his philosophical materialism as expressed in his poetry, intellectual diary, and essays. Frank Rosengarten pays particular attention to the ways in which the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche illuminates Leopardi's world view. He also devotes a section of the book to the different personal, moral, and philological components of Leopardi's humanism. Throughout, he maintains a sharp focus on the connections between Leopardi's life and the historical period in which he lived. The major themes and human concerns expressed in Leopardi's writings relate to his life experiences and to the historical period in which he lived. Of central interest are nobility and love, since Leopardi's perception of these two themes evolved and changed as he acquired a more general and universal conception of life. This fascinating combination of classical and modern perspectives on life and literature is highlighted throughout the book.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

For fifteen years between 1817 and 1832 Giacomo Leopardi's notebook the Zibaldone grew like an expanding universe, recording the emergence and development of his thought until, on 4 December 1832, on page 4526, it fell silent. Philosophical reflections, private memories, poetry, observations on politics and society are only some of the creative expressions of Leopardi's quest, which both enriched his everyday life and at the same time sheltered him from the tyranny of rationality and the death of illusions which he perceived as intrinsic to modernity. There is no other work in world literature quite like it, and yet, strictly speaking, the Zibaldone is not even a work. Private in character but constantly opening up to virtual interlocutors, it gained readers only on publication sixty years after Leopardi's death. Its importance in Western thought, however, is yet to be fully appreciated, not only in terms of its content but also in terms of its form. In this major new study, Cori follows Leopardi's philosophical journey and traces the origin of a sensibility towards the ephemeral, the hyper-real and the simulacrum, which would only truly be understood during modernity and post-modernity, and which Leopardi is the first Italian thinker to perceive.

Are you curious about the private laboratory of Giacomo Leopardi, Italy’s greatest modern lyrical poet? Interested in using expert maps to explore it, while deepening your acquaintance with one of the most creative materialist thinkers? This collection of essays makes very original use of the new translation of Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri and investigates its connections to all his other works. Whether your primary interest lies in Italian literature and criticism, linguistics and poetics, the origins of genres such as the fantastic, or in philosophical queries regarding materialism and hedonism, this collection offers original research that will challenge the reader to view this outstanding intellectual in a new light. Offering some of the earliest reflections against anthropocentrism, championing the artist’s interest in the natural sciences, and questioning humanity’s purpose(s) in this world, Leopardi’s work is presented in this volume as an indispensable tool to understand the complexity of Italy’s cultural transformations between the 18th and the 19th centuries.

A profound meditation on Leopardi’s art and thought as well as a reframing and reassertion of Negri’s own philosophical and political project of liberation. Antonio Negri, one of Italy’s most influential and controversial contemporary philosophers, offers in this book a radical new interpretation of the nineteenth-century Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. For Negri, Leopardi is not the bitter, idealistic individualist of conventional literary history, but rather a profoundly materialist thinker who sees human solidarity as the only possible solution to the catastrophes of history and politics. Negri traces Leopardi’s resistance to the transcendental idealism of Kant and Hegel, with its emphasis on reason’s power to resolve real antagonisms into abstract syntheses, and his gradual development of a sophisticated poetic materialism focused on the constructive power of the imagination and its “true illusions.” Like Nietzsche (who admired him), Leopardi provides an alternative to modernity within modernity, expressing a force of rupture and recomposition—a uniquely Italian one—that is as relevant now as it was in the nineteenth century, and which connects to the theory of Empire as the political constitution of the present that Negri has elaborated in collaboration with Michael Hardt.