CHAPTER TWO

A New Paradigm

An Exemplary Text

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

5

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

10

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.1

15

The Infinite

Always dear to me was this solitary hill,

And this hedge, which such a large part

Of the farthest horizon from my view excludes.

But sitting and gazing, interminable

Spaces beyond that, and superhuman

5

Silences, and the most profound quiet

I, in my thought, imagine; where nearly

My heart takes fright. And as the wind

I hear rustling among these plants, that

Infinite silence with this sound

10

I begin to compare: and what comes to me is the eternal,

And the seasons dead, and the present

And alive one, and the sound of it. Thus amidst this

Immensity my thought drowns:

And being shipwrecked is sweet to me in this sea.

15

Leopardi wrote “The Infinite” between the spring and fall of 1819 and published it for the first time, with a few variations, in the literary magazine Nuovo Ricoglitore, between December 1825 and January 1826, in a series of pieces titled “Idilli.” The poem was later included in the collection Versi, which came out in 1826, and finally in the first edition of Canti, published in 1831. For anyone familiar with Italian literary language who knows the meaning of words outside contemporary usage, such as ermo (“solitary”), il guardo (“gaze”), and mi fingo (“I imagine to myself”), the literal meaning is not hard to understand.²

The meter of this poem, free hendecasyllable,³ proliferated starting in the second half of the sixteenth century and was very popular from the second half of the eighteenth century on, in texts very different from one another in tone and topic. We find it in Giuseppe Parini’s Il giorno (1763–1765 and 1801, The Day), in some lyrical introspective poems by Vincenzo Monti, “Pensieri d’amore” (1783, “Love Thoughts”) and “Al Principe Don Sigismondo Chigi” (1783, “To Prince Don Sigismondo Chigi”), and in Foscolo’s On Sepulchres (1807). Given that Leopardi had only written one sonnet in a serious style,⁴ preferring less fixed and less rhymed poetic forms, it is likely that the fifteen verses of “The Infinite” and the sixteen of another one of the “Idylls,” “Alla Luna” (“To the Moon”),⁵ represent a challenge to the traditional meter of short Italian lyric poetry. It seems as if he sought to condense content suited to a sonnet into a form freed from the constriction of rhyme.⁶

The poem is composed of four sentences, but it can be divided into three parts. Lines 1–3:

Always dear to me was this solitary hill,

And this hedge, which such a large part

Of the farthest horizon from my view excludes.

The main body (lines 4–13):

But sitting and gazing, interminable

Spaces beyond that, and superhuman

5

Silences, and the most profound quiet

I, in my thought, imagine; where nearly

My heart takes fright. And as the wind

I hear rustling among these plants, that

Infinite silence with this sound

10

I begin to compare: and what comes to me is the eternal,

And the seasons dead, and the present

And alive one, and the sound of it.

And the closing (lines 13–15):

Thus amidst this

Immensity my thought drowns:

And being shipwrecked is sweet to me in this sea.

At the beginning, the speaker says that he has always cherished a particular landscape, and he describes it briefly in a few words. The number of deictics (eight in fifteen verses) is surprising, as is the fact that the background is almost completely suppressed, because it is already known to the speaker, who refers to it using the deictics of familiarity (“this hill,” “this hedge”). The anecdote is not a topos. Leopardi describes similar things in two prose passages that refer to a lived experience, either imaginary or real. The first dates back to the spring of 1819, from the same period as the poem, and appears in notes for his future autobiographical novel. What remains of the work are only a few pages, rough sketches of some scenes, including this one:

my observations on the plurality of worlds and the nothingness of us and this earth and on the greatness and force of nature that we measure by torrents, etc., which are nothing on this globe, which is nothing in the world, and awakened by a voice calling me to dinner so that our lives seem like a nothingness to me and time and famous names and all of history, etc., on the biggest and most admirable buildings that do no more than roughen up this little globe the rough things that can’t be seen from slightly above and slightly far away, but from slightly above our globe appears to be smooth …⁷

The second, written after he composed the idyll, comes from the Zibaldone:

Besides, sometimes the soul might desire, and actually does desire, a view that is restricted or confined in some way, as in Romantic situations. The reason is the same, a desire for the infinite, because then, instead of sight, the imagination is at work and the fantastic takes over from the real. The soul imagines what it cannot see, whatever is hidden by that tree, that hedge, that tower, and wanders in an imaginary space and pictures things in a way that would be impossible if its view could extend in all directions, because the real would exclude the imaginary.⁸

In the first lines of “The Infinite,” the speaker describes once something that can be assumed to have happened several times in reality.⁹ An interval of time separates the experience from the writing about the experience, as suggested by the past simple used in the first line (“Always dear to me was this solitary hill”).¹⁰ In line 4, the static, declarative rhythm of the opening sentence is interrupted by a visual sensation: the interminable open spaces beyond the hedge summon up the first perception of the infinite—a spatial perception—to which the speaker reacts with fear (lines 4–8). Then, when the wind rustles among the plants, the sound summons up a second perception of the infinite, this time of a temporal nature (lines 8–13). The second segment of the text is stirred up by the conflict between meter and syntax. Compared to lines 1–3, the chronological distance between the event and the writing seems to have changed in lines 4–13: it seems as if the poem no longer describes a habit, as in the first lines, but an experience happening here and now. In line 1 the simple past was used (“mi fu,” “to me was”); in line 8 the simple present is used (“E come il vento | Odo stormir fra queste piante,” “And as the wind | I hear rustling among these plants”), as if to record an unexpected, specific event.¹¹ In lines 13–15 the speech seems to calm down: the meaning of the experience is summarized by the speaker in the form of a declarative statement; the fear in line 8 is replaced by the sweetness of the final shipwreck, and the distance seems to grow between the event and the telling of the event.

This division into parts based on content is mirrored in a division into parts based on form. In the first three lines the conflict between meter and syntax is minimal, the verses end with a uniform cadence,¹² the vocabulary derives from Petrarch or from the bucolic tradition,¹³ and the syntax is less impressionistic, giving an assertive order to the experience. There are two anastrophes, but the second one is not particularly striking in a poetic text, while the first one (line 1) is more the product of structural constraints than an aesthetic choice. While the syntax of the first segment follows the standards of rational ordering, the second opens with an adversative conjunction that is difficult to interpret. Why does it say “But sitting and gazing”? How are we to explain this sudden “But,” which would be only partially justified by a purely rational arrangement of the words? According to Franco Ferrucci, the adversative would be the remains of an aborted speech, almost as if the lyric speaker intended to say “I can’t go on the way I began—I wanted to express something in particular, but here instead is what came to me later.” What ends up on the page would thus be the elliptical remains of his original intention: a sort of amputated grammatical stump that does not fit into a purely explicative sentence.¹⁴ According to Luigi Blasucci, the opposition set up by “But” refers only to the second part of the preceding sentence (“this hedge, which such a large part | Of the farthest horizon from my view excludes”), and the logic it obeys is more poetic than conceptual.¹⁵

Line 4 begins a dynamic portion of the text, in which the conflict between meter and syntax becomes systemic, with emphatic enjambments separating the syntagms that express the experience of the infinite: interminati | Spazi (“interminable | Spaces”), sovrumani | Silenzi (“superhuman | Silences”), quello | Infinito silenzio (“that | Infinite silence”). The syntax is complicated by two anastrophes (lines 4–6 and 9–11) and by a fugue of subjects connected by the anaphora that repeats the conjunction “And” (“the eternal | And the seasons dead, and the present | And alive one, and the sound of it”). This dispositio is read by commentators as a form of mimesis of his thought: an attempt to imitate the experience of the infinite exactly as it presents itself to the mind of the experiencer in the moment, rather than being put into some order after the fact. The significance of the anastrophes in lines 4–6 and 9–11 is less obvious but perhaps identical: both put the object of perception before the act of perceiving and, in one case, before the subject of perception itself (“interminable | Spaces … I, in my thought, imagine”). If we were to follow the natural order, by writing “I imagine in my thought the interminable spaces beyond that and superhuman silences and the most profound quiet,” we would destroy the effect of the poem, because Leopardi disturbs the natural sequence of speech in order to evoke the bewilderment of the speaker, who is overwhelmed by the object of his thought and thrown back to the end of the sentence, by using a stylistic element that seeks to be a formal equivalent of the experience described.¹⁶ The vocabulary changes radically too: interminati (“interminable”), sovraumana (“superhuman”), profondissma (“most profound”), infinito (“infinite”), immensità (“immensity”), naufragar (“to be shipwrecked”) have no connection with the Petrarchan tradition or the bucolic lexicon.¹⁷ Like the enjambments that recall the perception of the infinite by dividing noun and adjective, the lexicon seems to aim for a similar effect. The words in the first three lines are all short, with the exception of “horizon,” whereas almost all the words in the second segment are emphatically multisyllabic, as if to mimic the vastness of the mental object to which they refer, reinforcing the effect of the superlatives and the indefinite plurals.¹⁸

While the tone of the second part is emotional, the beginning of the last part (“Thus amidst this”) proceeds logically, like an argument, and the sentence that follows sums up, at a distance, the perception that lines 4–13 describe with immediacy. The conflict with the meter settles down bit by bit and the powerful enjambment of lines 13–14 (“Thus amidst this | Immensity”) is followed by a pause that does not break up the sentence. Indeed, the last line of the poem is also the only one that can stand on its own, apart from the opening line.¹⁹ The fear aroused by the first sight of the infinite yields to the sweetness of being shipwrecked, and the chronological and sentimental distance between the experience and the writing about the experience, which in the central part of the poem appeared to be minimal, now returns with greater magnitude. The beginning is thus echoed in the end, but from a greater height.

Interpretations

No nineteenth-century Italian poem has attracted so many commentators²⁰ and so many translations into English.²¹ A great deal of the comments emphasize one aspect specifically: the form of “The Infinite” seems inseparable from the experience it describes. “In my opinion,” wrote Adriano Tilgher, “ ‘The Infinite’ is not the analysis but the narrating (something quite different) of a spiritual process.”²² Mario Fubini came to a similar conclusion after comparing the style of the poem to the equivalent passage in the Zibaldone: in the prose text, the work of the imagination follows a rational logic; in the poem, it is represented “with immediacy and accents of singular novelty, like someone discovering an unexplored region of his soul.”²³ Blasucci builds on Fubini’s observations and sees the Zibaldone passage as the critical, reflective summary of the mental process that the poem reenacts, mimicking the way thought unfolds, as if the text were not a description of the experience made after the fact but an authentic itinerarium mentis in infinitum, a journey of the mind to infinity, brought to the page.²⁴

It is not difficult to pick up on a familiar Romantic paradigm in the critical responses of these readers. Fubini states it plainly in the “Introduction” to his commentary:

The topics and forms of Leopardi’s poems may be different, but the reader has the impression of recognizing a single subject in all of them: the poet’s heart.… A lyric by Leopardi does not tell a story; it does not describe: it is the outpouring of a heart.… His language is not that of someone conveying to others an experience that has ended but that of someone who is addressing himself. Think of any of Petrarch’s canzoni, such as “Di pensier in pensier” (“From thought to thought”): Petrarch who speaks to us about the perpetual undulations of his soul is not Petrarch who wanders from thought to thought, from mountain to mountain. The poet who composes the canzone has achieved complete understanding of himself and can therefore contemplate and describe each of his own contradictions, one by one. Not so Leopardi, who seeks to make the undulations of his soul perceptible in his verses, to convey feelings as they first take form in their original order.… In Leopardi’s poetry, the soul’s time takes sensible form: the reader is made to feel the action sung by the poet as something present.²⁵

Here, we find all the Romantic topoi: Leopardi’s poetry is “the outpouring of a heart” written in a language that ignores or is unaware of the presence of external interlocutors—it is the language of someone who “addresses himself,” the poems in Canti are autobiographical, and the reflection of the self is reflected in the style. The syntax follows “the life of feelings,” the meter rejects overly rigid rhyme schemes to allow the “heart’s changing voice” to speak,²⁶ the “simple” lexicon” expresses an “ineffable inner turmoil,” the poems tell “the story of a soul.”²⁷ Incidentally, “Storia di un’anima” (“Story of a soul”) was the title of the autobiographical novel that Leopardi was thinking about writing, and “the memoirs of a soul”(les mémoires d’une âme) was the expression Victor Hugo later used to describe his Les Contemplations.²⁸ The first edition of Fubini’s critical commentary on the Canti came out in 1930. In the foreword to the second edition the author acknowledges the limits of such an ingenuously Romantic reading; in his collected essays, Metrica e poesia (1962), he uses more coldly technical tones but essentially repeats the same schemas: Petrarch’s poetry orders experience in retrospect, whereas Leopardi shows “the undulations of thought.”²⁹ In 1980, starting from very different assumptions, Franco Brioschi arrived at the same conclusions when he wrote that the metrical and syntactical structures of “The Infinite” do more than just describe the experience. They reproduce its most intimate form:

The metrical and syntactical structures reproduce the journey [of thought] itself … The reader is not called upon to meet with the author on the ‘public’ level of the literary institution in order to witness this observatory of the experience portrayed.… This is how a profoundly new relationship of communication is born, intended to incite in the hearer a projective type of attitude: rather than represent an emotion, the poem is its equivalent.³⁰

Critical writings that reflect on the novelty of “The Infinite” present the same design: they all say that the text has a close link with the author’s experience and life history; they say that the style of the composition is opposite to the logical, rational style of other poems, in the same way that the desire for immediacy is opposite to mediation. Terms of comparison often crop up: Fubini compares “The Infinite” with the poetry of Petrarch, Della Casa, and Foscolo; Blasucci compares the way Petrarch and the pastoral poetry tradition interpret the idyll genre with how Leopardi interprets it.³¹ Behind such juxtapositions we glimpse the logic of the Romantic paradigm and the outline of its essential concepts autobiography and self-expression. But which parts of these critical readings are accurate?

Seriousness and Contingency

It is true that Leopardi’s idylls, and to a lesser extent Alfieri’s Rime and Foscolo’s sonnets and On Sepulchres, are the first modern Italian lyric poems—the first Italian texts in which we glimpse the signs of the revolution that would transfigure European poetry in the century to come. From this point of view, “The Infinite” is special: judging it by the yardstick of novelty, in style and spirit, we might say that few other Italian poems in the first half of the nineteenth century came so close to what the lyric would later become. But it would be ingenuous to fetishize the novelty of a single case: the history of culture does not take leaps, even in its most revolutionary periods, and “The Infinite” is a revolutionary poem—not so much because of its novelties but, above all, because of the changes that it condenses within itself and those that it announces. Phenomena that run through the poetry of the eighteenth century and transformations that would become clear only in the periods after Leopardi’s work, or even in the poetry of the early twentieth century, are crystallized in this poem in an initial form. What makes “The Infinite” a new type of poetry?

To begin with, its subject matter. One of the most longstanding constants of Western literature is the rule of the division of styles (Stiltrennungsregel), whose history Erich Auerbach reconstructed in Mimesis (1946). Auerbach traces out a philosophy of European literary history by following the changes in this written and nonwritten norm. In his view, the representation of reality in Greek and Latin literature is governed by a principle that acts as a habit or as a codified rule from one time to the next. We already find it in the Iliad and the Odyssey: the Homeric bards distinguished the narratable from the unnarratable in a hierarchical and classist way; significant deeds are performed for the most part by the ruling and warrior class, while the other parts of society have a secondary, servile function.³² During the fourth century BCE, this tendency gave rise to a sort of law. The first illustrious text to proclaim the separation of styles as a simultaneously descriptive and normative principle is the second chapter of Aristotle’s Poetics:

The things that representative artists represent are the actions of people, and if people are represented they are necessarily either superior [spoudaious] or inferior [phaulous], better or worse, than we are. (Differences in character you see derive from these categories, since it is by virtue [arete] or vice [kakia] that people are ethically distinct from each other.)³³

This three-part division gave rise to internal differences in every artistic discipline: among painters, Polygnotus portrayed people better than us; Pauson, people who are worse than us; and Dionysius, people just like us. Among the epic poets, Homer told tales of the actions of heroes, who are better than us; Hegemon of Thasos and Nicochares spoke of men who are inferior to us, while Cleophon talked about people “like us.”³⁴ Classical rhetoric gave a systematic order to Aristotle’s categories, formulating a schema that groups speeches and texts into three genera elocutionis—lowly or humble, medium or intermediate, and sublime—and linking them to the type of subject matter, according to a principle first expressed by Theophrastus. Based on this idea, ancient oratory tightly bound the qualities of the characters to the qualities of the story, the style, and the interest demanded of the reader. It did this by establishing a rule that mirrors their rigid social hierarchy, with only one possible exception, that of parody—a violation that overturns the rule without negating its value. The medieval rota Vergilii gives us a perfect illustration of these correspondences from a later period: Virgil’s wheel condenses the genera of ancient rhetoric into a unified schema, linking together the social class of the hero, the type of action represented, and the type of ornatus. This strict ordering principle allowed for styles to be alternated within the same speech, but not for them to be mixed up completely.³⁵

In reality, this three-part schema is only theoretical. The text of the Poetics (at least in the version we know) already rests on a two-pronged antithesis, opposing tragedy and serious epic to comedy and comic epic, failing to mention any middle forms. In ancient Greek culture, the principles that enshrined the hierarchy between people were both social and moral: someone better than us possesses virtue (arete) and is spoudaios, meaning “worthwhile,” “serious” but also “noble”; someone worse than us is marked by a vice (kakia) or a flaw (hamartema) and is phaulos, meaning “trivial,” “lightweight,” or even “ignoble.” The intermediate case is not explicitly mentioned, but it is implied that people “like us” live in the realm of common life, that is, in the realm of activities that generate the well-being required to enter into the higher realms of public action and a theoretical life, but which grant no eminent virtue in themselves. While there may have been three genres of rhetoric, the ancient Stiltrennung proved to be asymmetric and binary, because the boundaries between the humble and the intermediate were never entirely certain. Indeed, the low style could include the comic, the satiric, the playfully erotic, the obscene, but also daily life, factual information, sketches, and trivia. The mime, the iambic, and the satire all belonged to the lowly genre as well, but so did the sections in a judicial oration that referred to private or economic matters.³⁶ There is no doubt that ancient Greek and Latin cultures reserved much less attention to people “like us” than what modern literature devotes to them. A large portion of reality that today we judge worthy of serious, tragic, or problematic mimesis, writes Auerbach, was confined to the domain of the comic or the intermediate style.

[For the rule of division of styles] everything commonly realistic [alles gemein Realistische], everything pertaining to everyday life must not be treated on any level except the comic, which admits no problematic probing [ohne problematische Vertiefung].… We are forced to conclude that there could be no serious literary treatment of everyday occupations and social classes—merchants, artisans, peasants, slaves—of everyday scenes and places—home, shop, field, store—of everyday customs and institutions—marriage, children, work, earning a living.³⁷

As the reflection of a hierarchical society, the ancient Stiltrennung dominated Greek and Latin literature and rhetoric, clashed with Christian creatural realism modeled on the Bible, and in the late Middle Ages combined with another form of stylistic separation that grew out of courtly literature. When Renaissance humanism rediscovered ancient poetics, the division of styles once again imposed its hegemony on the Western literary system: it spread during the period of European classicisms and finally dissolved forever when at the beginning of the nineteenth century the modern realistic novel propagated a new way of giving form to reality.³⁸ Only at that point did it become possible to do what ancient literature could never have done: represent the everyday life of common people, of people “like us,” in a serious, tragic, and problematic way (Auerbach uses these three adjectives, ernst, tragisch, problematisch).

For centuries, the Stiltrennung was the most important partage du sensible in Western literature.³⁹ In reconstructing the history of this law, Auerbach produced the only philosophy of literary history that has stood up to the skepticism of our age, which is attentive to details and distrustful of the whole. However, although the overall plan of Mimesis remains valid, some of its general hypotheses do need to be corrected. Thomas Pavel is right when he observes that Auerbach associates two different precepts with the same name of Stiltrennung: the separation of styles in the strict sense and a corollary that should be treated apart. If we adopt the serious mimesis of everyday private life as our historical criterion, it could be said that bucolic-pastoral literature and Hellenistic novels preceded the realism of Balzac and Stendhal by nearly two thousand years.⁴⁰ It could also be said that long before the arrival of novels, plays, and modern poems, New Comedy and Horatian-style lyric poetry spoke about the everyday affairs of private people—in the intermediate or noble styles but, in any case, in a serious tone. What distinguishes the ancient and classicist representation of everyday life from the representation that the realism of recent centuries has made familiar to us is the tendency to select the facts of reality through a filter that forces people and things to be stylized in order to adapt them to an a priori. Pavel calls this mode of representation “ideographic,” because instead of trying to represent events as they happen, these works imitate reality based on the presuppositions of a preestablished Idea.⁴¹ The division of styles, writes Pavel, is first of all an ideographic principle. One of its most important assumptions is the idea that contingencies, private details, minutiae, marginal data—what Roland Barthes called reality effects⁴²—are suitable for genres in low or intermediate styles (Old Comedy, New Comedy, Menippean satire, satire, verse epistle, epigram, nugae, and so forth) but not for genres written in the high style. In Latin poetry, for example, the genres of comic style, such as satire in the strict sense of the word, the verse epistle, and the epigram, recount anecdotes about private people in a sarcastic or everyday-prose version. Conversely, biographical material that belongs to genres written in a noble style, especially the ode, is put through a filter that makes it more abstract. Similarly, in Italian literature of the late thirteenth century, it was normal for a genre with a comic style, such as the tenson in verse, to reveal details about someone’s life, whereas the stories alluded to in lyrical love poems in the high style, even when written by the same author, remain generic, serial, and remote from any true individuation. This is a form of Stiltrennung that we find in Dante’s Rime, for example.

Leopardi had a solid classicist background, and during the years he was composing “The Infinite” he reiterated the essential principles of the division of styles in the first pages of his Zibaldone.⁴³ When he decided to call the six pieces that make up his series an “idyll,” he had a specific tradition in mind: the classic idylls of Moschus, the ancient bucolic, the modern pastoral, the sentimental idylls of Salomon Gessner.⁴⁴ These pieces share some common traits: typical situations, described in a medium or at most medium-high tone, the use of a pathetic-elegiac style, and a bucolic decor. This genealogy may perplex the modern reader, because the most important texts of the series named “Idylls” (“The Infinite,” “The Evening of the Holiday,” and “To the Moon”) have little or nothing to do with the tradition that Leopardi draws on. Today, we see a fracture between these poems and the compositions of Moschus, the pastoral tradition, and Gessner.⁴⁵

The first difference, as we were saying, lies in the subject matter. In “The Infinite” and “The Evening of the Holiday” a common individual speaker describes his experiences with a seriousness and existential density that would not be possible in Moschus, Gessner, or pastoral poetry.⁴⁶ The second difference involves the quality of the speaker and the nature of his experience: in Moschus, pastoral poetry, and Gessner the first person is an ideographic, stereotyped subject; the speaker in Leopardi has traits that are individual and cannot be interchanged. This union between biographical-testimonial realism and philosophical pathos, between minute details and existential gravitas, between contingency and seriousness, is a completely new factor. It breaks free of the limits that classicist poetics associated with a form such as the idyll, intended to accommodate typical situations described in a medium style with a pathetic-sentimental attitude. Leopardi’s poems do not set limits on the import of the experiences they describe: his reflection on infinity, on the nature of memory, on death, on the twilight of all the things we find in “The Infinite,” “The Evening of the Holiday,” and “To the Moon” go beyond the limits of the models from which Leopardi claimed he took his inspiration.

In his “Literary Designs” of 1828, when he talks again about the idyll as a genre, the criterion he uses to define it is not classicist: idylls are poems “expressing situations, affections, historical adventures of my soul.”⁴⁷ “Historical” is most probably a technical term: it refers to one of the cornerstones of ancient poetics, the antithesis between history and poetry set out in book nine of Aristotle’s Poetics. Poetry relates the universal and the verisimilar, says Aristotle, what happens to a certain type of character kata to eikos e to anankaion, “in terms of verisimilitude and necessity”; history relates the particular and the true, what someone has done or has happened to him or her.⁴⁸ The Aristotelian and classicist concept of verisimilitude overlaps an empirical criterion of probability and a moral and social criterion of exemplarity: the first is similar to what reigns in the modern concept of realism; the second is completely different. In line with the latter, poetry’s task is to show the world how it should be, not how it is. A noble character must behave nobly: although we know from experience that the opposite occurs at times, the task of the poet is to portray the ideal essence of aristocratic characters. Conversely, the historian has the option of recounting the imperfect behavior of a real aristocrat.

In ancient and classicist literary theory, compositions that follow the rules of poetry in Aristotle’s terms are ideographic; those that are presented as history are not. Between roughly 1550 and 1800, in prefatory materials of texts that converge into the genre of the novel, the adjectives “poetic” and “historical” designate two classes of writings: the first represent characters and stories as they should be, according to the Aristotelian principles of verisimilitude; the second imitate the way of representing reality that is typical of historical works, which start from the real and its unpredictability.⁴⁹ When Leopardi writes “situations, affections, historical adventures of my soul,” he means that his idylls talk about personally lived experiences. He is the first Italian writer to introduce an unprecedented amount of private contingency into subjective poetry written in a high style, and “The Infinite” is the poem where this novelty is revealed. Between 1824 and 1828, Leopardi stopped writing poems;⁵⁰ after 1828, his new compositions would become increasingly autobiographical. Many private details (his years of study, the loves of his youth, life in his village) would spill into his poems, and the novelty of the content would become more evident. This is what De Sanctis is referring to in his still Romantic vocabulary when he writes that Leopardi, like Foscolo, makes the man speak and not a mask, and this is what many modern readers repeat when they argue that Leopardi’s poems introduce a different type of poetic autobiography, foreign to the previous literature and familiar to the later.

Three Models of Lyric Poetry

Critics have used comparisons to illustrate this truth: De Sanctis opposed Leopardi to Pietro Metastasio, while Fubini opposed Leopardi to Petrarch. These antitheses are asymmetrical: Metastasio’s speaker is almost always generic and interchangeable; Petrarch’s speaker has a definite identity, and he corresponds to the person whose name appears on the Canzoniere. In other words, the comparisons that critics have used to explain Leopardi’s novelty refer to not two but three different models of poetic subject and lyric poetry: the first two date from before the Romantic period, the third is absolutely modern. In the first, the speaker is not a specific biographical person but a generic collective persona, a replaceable I who has experiences that are individual (they are described in the first-person singular) but not individualized (they are indistinct and emblematic). In archaic Greek poetry, in medieval love poetry, or in improvised popular poetry, for example, the character who says I is almost always a type, “the site of a role,”⁵¹ and not an empirical individual. The experiences evoked by Alcaeus, or by most of the troubadours, or by the improvised poetry accompanied by music that flourished in the 1700s, are serial in nature and could adapt effortlessly to a multiplicity of real first persons. To give a name to writings conceived this way, we could use the word by which German Romance philologists define the poetry of the troubadours: Gesellschaftslyrik, social lyric.⁵² From this point of view, archaic Greek lyric, the poetry of the troubadours, and eighteenth-century musical poetry intended for court and salon audiences are examples of Gesellschaftslyrik. Often, although not always, social verse is accompanied by music.

The second model arose in Latin literature of the first century BCE. When Paul Allen Miller writes that “the ego of Catullus, just as the ‘Je’ of ‘Je est un autre’ or the ‘self’ of ‘Song of Myself,’ must be rigorously distinguished in both its content and poetic function from the ego of the archaic poets of Greece,” he traces out a boundary and underlines the birth of a new lyric subject. The first person we encounter in the work of Catullus, the elegiasts, Horace, and Ovid is a personal I, not a serial one.⁵³ The poetry of the Middle Ages experienced a similar transformation with Dante’s Vita nuova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which introduce into a love poetry marked until then by the traits of Gesellschaftslyrik individualized biographical experiences that escape the confines of seriality.⁵⁴ In terms of novel outcomes and the power of the model that dominated European poetry for centuries to come, the decisive example was Petrarch. The Canzoniere orders the poems in a book that does not tell the indefinite tale of two generic lovers but, rather, focuses on the ethical and psychological story of a first person endowed with a specific identity and a complex inner life. This is how the ritual space of erotic romance poetry, dominated by the relationship between love and the fixed characters of the beloved and the lover, was transformed into an introspective space.⁵⁵

The opposition dividing Gesellschaftslyrik from personal lyric poetry is not rigid: the boundaries can be hazy and the two genres can coexist.⁵⁶ In Italy, social verse continued to be practiced widely before and after the Canzoniere. Indeed, for centuries Petrarch—the first great introspective poet of European vernacular literature—became the model, imitated in letter but betrayed in spirit, that inspired the most extensive phenomenon of Gesellschaftslyrik ever known to European poetry: Petrarchism. In this regard, writes Joel Fineman,

As the sonnet develops—as Petrarch, say, turns into Petrarchism—poetic subjectivity becomes increasingly artificial at the same time as, and in direct proportion to the way that, the sonneteering poet becomes increasingly thematically self-conscious about the rhetoricity of praise. This is why … it is necessary to introduce a distinction between the poetic person of Dante or Petrarch as opposed to the poetic persona of Sidney or Spenser.… As the sonnet form evolves—in the progress, if that is what it is, from Beatrice to Laura to Stella—it can be observed that poetic first person increasingly and, it seems deliberately presents itself in terms of what is understood to be a merely literary figure of a self.⁵⁷

In the history of English literature, it was Shakespeare’s Sonnets and John Donne’s Songs and Sonnets that introduced a nongeneric model of subjectivity different from that of Gesellschaftslyrik. The fact that the former was rediscovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the latter a hundred years later is symptomatic.⁵⁸ What modern readers find in the poetry of Shakespeare and Donne, and what they cannot find in Sidney or Spenser, is a credibility, a biographic fullness that other Renaissance poets do not possess. And although twentieth-century criticism has shown that these sorts of works preserve many rituals of genre, a great deal of Shakespeare’s and Donne’s success as lyric poets hangs on the power with which these authors were able to inject new existential density into the web of conventions. It was precisely starting in the Romantic era that the subjective poetry of Sappho, Catullus, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, and Shakespeare began to be read in light of the new paradigm. And yet this very paradigm is what created the conditions for a new way of saying I to develop, in a different way from the one we find in these authors. How are we to explain this transition?

Public and Private

I would begin by starting from the end and working backward, from the model of autobiographical lyric poetry that we have become accustomed to over the last two centuries. Let us look at two poems by Louise Glück. The first is from her debut book, Firstborn (1968), and the second from her 1999 book, Vita Nova:

Returning a Lost Child

Nothing moves. In its cage, the broken

Blossom of a fan sways

Limply, trickling its wire, as her thin

Arms, hung like flypaper, twist about the boy …

Later, blocking the doorway, tongue

Pinned to the fat wedge of his pop, he watches

As I find the other room, the father strung

On crutches, waiting to be roused …

Now squeezed from thanks the woman’s lemonade lies

In my cup. As endlessly she picks

Her spent kleenex into dust, always

Staring at that man, hearing the click,

Click of his brain’s whirling empty spindle …⁵⁹

Formaggio

The world

was whole because

it shattered. When it shattered,

then we knew what it was.

It never healed itself.

But in the deep fissures, smaller worlds appeared:

it was a good thing that human beings made them;

human beings know what they need,

better than any god.

On Huron Avenue they became

a block of stores; they became

Fishmonger, Formaggio. Whatever

they were or sold, they were

alike in their function: they were

visions of safety. Like

a resting place. The salespeople

were like parents; they appeared

to live there. On the whole,

kinder than parents.

Tributaries

feeding into a large river: I had

many lives. In the provisional world,

I stood where the fruit was,

flats of cherries, clementines,

under Hallie’s flowers.

I had many lives. Feeding

into a river, the river

feeding into a great ocean. If the self

becomes invisible has it disappeared?

I thrived. I lived

not completely alone, alone

but not completely, strangers

surging around me.

That’s what the sea is:

we exist in secret.

I had lives before this, stems

of a spray of flowers: they became

one thing, held by a ribbon at the center, a ribbon

visible under the hand. Above the hand,

the branching future, stems

ending in flowers. And the gripped fist—

that would be the self in the present.⁶⁰

Both poems seem like the visible shards of a biographical scene that remains cloaked to us in its entirety. They are made to be understood in slivers, and their meaning resides in the dialectic between what we understand, what we guess, and what we are unable to decipher completely. In “Returning a Lost Child,” a reader without critical notes or commentary by the poet might understand that the speaker, perhaps while returning a lost child, has gone into the home of a family riddled with conflicts. In the first two stanzas of “Formaggio,” the speaker reflects on the relationship between the world as a whole and small private worlds; in the third, we understand that the speaker is thinking about a specific place. Readers who know the places mentioned or the biography of the author can understand that Huron Avenue is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and that Fishmonger, Formaggio, and Hallie’s Flowers are stores on that street. Their names are probably mentioned because the lyric I is thinking about them. They are related to her life, but the reader cannot decipher every mental association and every detail.

These poems belong to the public sphere (that is, to literature, which is always a social and ritual affair), but they shift the axis of communication further inward, in interiore homine, into the inner person. It is as if biography had earned the right to appear on the page without too many mediations. This way of articulating private experience is absolutely modern, and the sign of this shift is the diffusion of a certain type of poetic obscurity that is accentuated in Glück’s poem. To take another example,

La speranza di pure rivederti

m’abbandonava;

e mi chiesi se questo che mi chiude

ogni senso di te, schermo d’immagini,

ha i segni della morte o dal passato

è in esso, ma distorto e fatto labile,

un tuo barbaglio:

(a Modena, tra i portici,

un servo gallonato trascinava

due sciacalli al guinzaglio).

The hope of even seeing you again

was leaving me;

and I asked myself if this which keeps me from

all sense of you, this screen of images,

is marked by death, or if, out of the past,

but deformed and diminished, it entails

some flash of yours:

(under the arcades, at Modena,

a servant in gold braid led

two jackals on a leash).⁶¹

This is a motet from Le occasioni (1939, The Occasions), Eugenio Montale’s second book. A reader unused to the language of modern poetry would probably find it incomprehensible. If they were familiar with the other poems in the collection, they would be able to understand that the “you” addressed by the first person is the same woman who appears in many other poems. They would also manage to decipher the meaning of the first two stanzas. Distant from his beloved, the speaker is afraid of losing even his hope of seeing her again, so he asks himself if the events that distract him from the woman’s memory are a sign of death or a glimmer of her that resurfaces from the past but in a distorted and weakened form. But what does the servant in gold braid with the leashed jackals have to do with it? What is the relationship between the final words in parentheses and the lines that come before them?

“The hope of even seeing you again” was written in 1937. In February 1950 Montale published a newspaper article in Corriere della Sera with the title “Two Jackals on a Leash.” In it he describes someone named Mirco, “a well-known poet who now has a different profession,” and about his short lyric poems that remained for years in his vest pocket, addressed to a woman named Clizia who lived three thousand miles away. One summer day, Mirco was walking under the porticos of Modena, absorbed in his thoughts of her and annoyed by the distractions. At a certain point, two very strange dogs appeared in front of him, held on a leash by an old man in a gold-braided uniform. Mirco stopped and asked what breed of dog they were. The old man answered that they were jackals, not dogs. These very unexceptional words galvanized Mirco, because Clizia loved odd, amusing animals, and by calling them jackals, the old man had summoned her into his thoughts. From then on, Modena and jackals remained tied to his memory of the woman: “Could the two beasts have been sent by her, as if by emanation? Could they be an emblem, an occult citation, a senhal? Or maybe they were just a hallucination, the premonitory signs of her decline, of her end?” Sometime later, Mirco writes the first two stanzas of the motet; then he adds the third and puts it in parentheses, to isolate the episode and suggest a different tone of voice, “the astonishment of an intimate, distant memory.”⁶²

In the Corriere della Sera article, Montale ironically reenacts the bewilderment of his early readers in the face of such an obscure transition: “ ‘who was the owner of the jackals?’ someone asked, ‘And what did Modena have to do with it? Why Modena and not Parma or Voghera? And the man with the jackals? Was he a servant? An adman?’ ”⁶³ What could average readers who knew nothing about the biographical background—like everyone who read the 1939 edition of Le occasioni—understand before Montale’s work became an object of study and commentary? They could understand the situation, that the speaker in the poem is connected to a woman whom he is desperate to see again; they can grasp the literal meaning of the second strophe; and they might guess that the jackals are not an allegory but a fact of reality related in some obscure way to the preceding lines. Nevertheless, the literal meaning of the poem remains indecipherable until a document external to it intervenes to explain the most intimate information in an individual’s existence: a free mental association.

Montale’s and Glück’s poems are born from a metonymic framing that isolates a series of unrelated scenes from the totality, as if poems were lands that rose up out of invisible biographical waters, and as if the writing imitated the reticence typical of linguistic acts associated with the private sphere: diary pages and interior monologue. They are examples of modern autobiographical lyricism, which does not organize the data of experience with the aim of a public explanation, but seeks to put them on the page while preserving their only partially transitive nature. The explanation, when there is one, comes later, in notes appearing below the text, or in the practice of accompanying the poem with commentary written in retrospect by the poet. Montale sometimes did this in Corriere della Sera. To cite another example, in a book-length interview with Dennis O’Driscoll, Seamus Heaney clarifies, among other things, the biographical background of some of his poems and the data of reality that in certain texts remain obscure or in suspense because they are completely private and intended to be that way.⁶⁴

In the last two centuries, this type of radically subjective poetry with a wealth of inward-looking mental associations has become the rule, changing readers’ horizon of expectations. Today we perceive a gap between this model and most premodern autobiographical poetry. Subjective poems of the new type appear much more intimately private than the old types, because they are able to describe the inner life with an unprecedented wealth of details. Only in the modern era, though, did references become so intimate that they became indecipherable in some cases. Premodern allusions always have an implicit or explicit social context—perhaps social relations between two people, which often occurs in poems addressed to a second person, in occasional lyric poetry, or in correspondence poems. In Horace’s Odes, for example, we find texts like this one (1, 33):

Albi, ne doleas plus nimio memor

inmitis Glycerae neu miserabilis

decantes elegos, cur tibi iunior

laesa praeniteat fide.

Insignem tenui fronte Lycorida

Cyri torret amor, Cyrus in asperam

declinat Pholoen: sed prius Apulis

iungentur capreae lupis,

quam turpi Pholoe peccet adultero.

Sic visum Veneri, cui placet imparis

formas atque animos sub iuga aenea

saevo mittere cum ioco.

Ipsum me melior cum peteret Venus,

grata detinuit compede Myrtale

libertina, fretis acrior Hadriae

curvantis Calabros sinus.

Tibúllus, do not grieve, obsessed with unkind

Glýcera, or drone sad elegies,

asking why she’s broken faith and now

prefers a younger man.

Her love for Cyrus burns Lycóris, fair

of brow, while Cyrus favors Phóloë

the harsh; but roe-deer will lie down

with hungry wolves before

an ugly lover beckons Phóloë.

Thus Venus has decreed, whose pleasure is

to bend to her bronze yoke forms and hearts

that do not match—cruel joke.

Although a better love was seeking me,

with pleasing bonds freedwoman Mýrtalë

possessed me, fiercer than the Adriatic

curving Calabria’s coast.⁶⁵

The poem is most probably addressed to Albius Tibullus, who was one of Horace’s friends. The identities of the other characters remain unknown, and this prevents us from understanding the literal meaning of some allusions that are presented almost as antonomasias (Lycoris, “fair of brow,” and Pholoë, “the harsh”). And yet the reader knows with certainty that, at least in the literary fiction, Tibullus can decipher every clue. He knows why Glycera is unkind or why Pholoë is harsh, and he knows because the logic of the composition presupposes it: the text does not refer to a radically private knowledge but to a tight-knit form of sociability. There is a similar example in one of Dante’s most famous sonnets:

Guido, i’ vorrei che tu e Lapo ed io

fossimo presi per incantamento,

e messi in un vasel ch’ad ogni vento

per mare andasse al voler nostro e mio,

sì che fortuna od altro tempo rio

non ci potesse dare impedimento,

anzi, vivendo sempre in un talento,

di stare insieme crescesse ‘l disio.

E monna Vanna e monna Lagia poi

con quella ch’è sul numer de le trenta

con noi ponesse il buono incantatore:

e quivi ragionar sempre d’amore,

e ciascuna di lor fosse contenta,

sì come i’credo che saremmo noi.

Guido, I wish that Lapo, you, and I

were carried off by some enchanter’s spell

And set upon a ship to sail the sea

where every wind would favor our command,

so neither thunderstorms nor cloudy skies

might ever have the power to hold us back,

but rather, cleaving to this single wish

that our desire to live as one would grow.

And Lady Vanna and Lady Lagia

borne to us with her who’s number thirty

by our good enchanter’s wizardry:

to talk of love would be our sole pursuit,

and each of them would find herself content,

just as I think that we should likewise be.⁶⁶

“Guido, I wish that …” is not a soliloquy. Although critics have not unequivocally identified the woman “who’s number thirty” mentioned by Dante in line 10, the reader understands that the allusion was crystal clear to the person to whom the sonnet is addressed, Guido Cavalcanti. Something similar occurs in the seventeenth of John Donne’s “Holy Sonnets”:

Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt

 To nature, and to hers, and my good is dead,

 And her soul early into heaven ravished,

Wholly in heavenly things my mind is set.

Here the admiring her my mind did whet

 To seek thee God; so streams do show the head;

 But though I have found thee’and thou my thirst hast fed,

A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.

But why should I beg more love, when as thou

 Dost woo my soul, for hers off’ring all thine:

And dost not only fear lest I allow

 My love to saints and angels, things divine,

But in thy tender jealousy dost doubt

Lest the world, flesh, yea, devil put thee out.⁶⁷

“She whom I loved” is Anne More, the sixteen-year-old that Donne had married clandestinely in December 1601, ruining his career, already made difficult by his Catholic ancestry.⁶⁸ Their secret marriage created a scandal at court, where Donne had become quite well known, partly thanks to the early circulation in the late 1590s of some of the lyric poems later collected in Songs and Sonnets. At the time Donne was working as a secretary for Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper. Anne More was Egerton’s niece and the daughter of another dignitary, George More, who, when the marriage was revealed, had Donne fired and thrown in jail. For many years Donne lived in poverty, with many children, aided by patrons such as Lady Magdalen Herbert, the mother of George Herbert, perhaps alluded to in “The Autumnal,” and by the Countess of Bedford, perhaps alluded to in “Twicknam Garden.” Anne More died in 1617, while giving birth to their twelfth child. This makes it possible to date the poem. Now, readers unfamiliar with Donne’s personal history were able to read the poem by placing it in an illustrious literary tradition that has Petrarch as its archetype: the death of the beloved is transmuted into a greater closeness to God. Only readers familiar with Donne’s background circumstances and personal history were able to decipher the private allusions and grasp all the implications. But in this case too, as for Horace and Dante, the text presupposes the existence of a group of people able to understand the literal meaning of the poem, in part because, having caused a scandal, the event referred to is a public one. When reading “Returning a Lost Child” by Glück, on the other hand, one cannot be sure that any reader would be able to fully grasp the biographical backdrop that the poem alludes to, whether real or imaginary, and which the speaker takes for granted; and the text is developed on the premise and introjection of this privateness into its structure. In the same way, one cannot be sure in “The hope of even seeing you again” whether the second person, you, will be able to understand the reasoning behind the last three lines. By addressing an absent second person, who is not expected to understand or respond, but simply to listen, the first person skips over all presuppositions and explanations to bring a completely private mental association into public, using a technique that has long belonged to the language of modern poetry. The same thing happens in Glück’s poems: the situations can be described, but the literal meaning of the individual passages is known exclusively to the speaker: only the author’s commentary would be able to clarify it completely. The poem plays on a dialectic between light and dark, between details that are illuminated and the whole that remains in shadow. Poems like “Returning a Lost Child,” “Formaggio” or “The hope of even seeing you again” make much more space for the minute, the accidental, and the unmotivated details of personal life than that given to these aspects in the past. The differences between the premodern autobiographical lyric and that of the Romantic era are no less significant than the differences separating Gesellschaftslyrik from the subjective poems of Catullus, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, or Donne.

Transcendental Autobiographism

Petrarch’s most important interpreter, Gianfranco Contini, defined the way Petrarch talks about his life in the Canzoniere as “transcendental autobiographism.”⁶⁹ Contini’s critical writing almost never makes the premises of his discourse explicit, and in this case too the literary meaning of the Kantian adjective “transcendental” remains vague. Examining how Contini uses the term, one understands that it refers to the type of autobiographical experience recounted by the Canzoniere: Petrarch talks about himself, about an individuated I, but at the same time tells an openly allegorical story, which he assembles by adjusting the data of reality to construct an exemplary Stoic and Augustinian journey that leads the character from the errors of youth to the wisdom of maturity. Unlike medieval love Gesellschaftslyrik, Petrarch’s speaker has a distinct identity and recounts specific autobiographical facts, such as when he praises the families of his patrons or inserts occasional pieces into the structure of the collection. Nevertheless, Petrarch always tries to preserve the universal value of his discourse by avoiding any references to overly particular circumstances.⁷⁰ The speaker is an individual but at the same time an exemplum; the experiences evoked are private but must also manage to be universally human.⁷¹ To achieve this, Petrarch censors or blurs anything too detailed or contingent; for example, by reabsorbing occasional poems into the complex allegorical structure in such a way as to maximally conceal their ephemeral origins. For Petrarch, events that are too circumstantial always run the risk of proving transient—a reasoning consistent with what the Stiltrennung decrees for compositions written in the noble style: personal life can have a metaphorical sense only when it conceals or redeems its contingency and becomes ideographic, that is, transcendental.

The form of the poems appears to be governed by the same policy. The chief characteristic of Petrarch’s style is his censorship of fortuitous details. The Canzoniere transmitted to European lyric poetry a hard-and-fast mechanism for selecting words and things. This mechanism is founded on a monolinguistic poetic vocabulary, which blots out the technical, prosaic, or spoken lexicon; and on an eternalizing representation of objects, transforming the data of reality into everlasting emblems and putting the indeterminate before the determinate and substances before accidents⁷²—an approach aligned with the assumptions of the Stiltrennung. Censorship in the mimesis of the external world is matched by an identical attitude in the mimesis of the inner life. In the Canzoniere, the space of the conscience is composed of rigid forces, not fluid movements. The speaker is not torn apart by intangible psychological conflicts or by an abrupt overlapping of ideas and impressions but by weighty moral conflicts that the categories of medieval psychology and philosophy translated into concepts.⁷³ This form of mimesis is not new: it descends from an age-old tradition that started with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric and continued up to the eighteenth century.⁷⁴ According to the schemas of this psychology, personal idiosyncrasy is transitory, like particular individuals: what counts is human beings caught in their essence and grouped under synthesizing categories that give form to the fluid flows of the mental life, attributing a single name to their dominant character trait (“astute,” “courageous,” “generous,” “treacherous”) and, even before that, to the forces that move it (“love,” “hate,” “pity,” “envy”). The Canzoniere tells a tale that is at the same time individual and allegorical; the speaker smooths down the overly personal traits of its own story to turn itself into an emblem; the structure of the poems makes itself impermeable to the contingency of occasional events. In the world created by the text, what happens in interiore homine is transposed onto the page through a lexicon and a syntax that are public. The forms of allusion to private references that we find in Glück or Montale would be impossible in Petrarch.

The idea of transcendental autobiographism lends itself to a wider theoretical use that goes beyond Petrarch. Transcendental autobiographism exists every time the desire to introduce contingent biographical elements meets with the need to maintain an ideographic filter that allegorizes and generalizes particularities. From this perspective, poetic genres have long been the most solid transcendental structures of European lyric. As long as the classes into which lyric poetry were divided continued to have an implicit or explicit normative value, authors of an ode or an epigram, a satire or a love poem knew that they would have to inject their own real identity into the confines of a preestablished poetic identity, adapting the events and idiosyncrasies of their lives to a public, ritual mold:

The composition of an epithalamium in archaic Greek poetry imposed certain limits on the author. He was conditioned by constraints on form and content that prevented him (to indicate extreme taboos) from using iambic trimeter for his meter as well as from arguing the idea, widespread in other contexts of archaic Greek poetry, that women represented the worst of all evils. This obstacle would present itself to the author even if, let us suppose, he found iambic trimeter to be the most congenial meter, or if he shared this misogynistic idea.⁷⁵

This holds true for Gesellschaftslyrik and, more generally, for all poetic forms weighted down by conventions, that is, most of Western poetry up to the second half of the eighteenth century. Even though the great innovators of premodern autobiographical poetry, from Catullus to Petrarch and Horace to Shakespeare, were able to carve out spaces for introspection within the rules—by expanding the thematic range of Latin genres, for example, or by shifting the subject of the laud from the beloved to the poet’s inner conflicts—their works did not entirely abandon the scaffoldings of genre and their transcendental function. For this reason especially, although Catullus’s speaker differs from that of archaic Greek lyric, the subject of his Liber is not yet that of Rimbaud or Whitman. The same holds for Horace, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Donne: the accidentality of their biographies is still filtered by genre structures that submit the contingency of life to public patterns.

The other decisive scaffolding, as we have seen, is the rule of the division of styles, which is internal to the system of poetic subgenres and runs throughout European literature. It reappears every time ancient models and poetics are assumed as a criterion of normative perfection. Another assumption belonging to the Stiltrennung stipulates that high-style genres are not suited to an overly detailed, documentary imitation of reality. The premodern attitude of transcendental autobiographism is always internal to the division of styles, whereas modern autobiographism tends to ignore it. Starting from a historical threshold that varies from one national literature to another but essentially coincides with the Romantic era, poets were able to recount ephemeral details of their contingent personal lives—real, self-fictionalized, or imaginary—with unprecedented confessional freedom, existential pathos, and seriousness.

This is what happens in Leopardi’s work. When we compare the way I is said in “The Infinite” with the schemas of transcendental autobiographism, we realize that the reasoning behind the display of the self appears to have changed. For lyric poetry to have a universal value, for the I to mean we, it is no longer necessary for the first person to censor the details of its peculiarities and become a type, an exemplum, resting on an allegorical and ideographic framework. Between Petrarch’s transcendental autobiographism and Leopardi’s, one discerns the same difference that separates Augustine’s Confessions from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s. How might we define this shift?

Differential Autobiographism

In the modern era, writes Georg Simmel, two different ideas of individuality took form. The first conceives of particular individuals as emanations of a general idea of the human being, who is the same in all times and places; the second values subjective differences, their peculiarities.⁷⁶ The first corresponds to Enlightenment rationalism and generated the idea of universal human rights; the second corresponds to Romantic and post-Romantic individualism, insists on particularities, and demands the right to bring each person’s idiosyncratic traits into the public sphere.

The paradigm that we glimpse in “The Infinite,” which then prevailed during the next two centuries, draws from such a model. This new type of autobiographism, which we might call differential, should not be understood in a naively Romantic sense. It is not the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” or the “free and straightforward expression of any living and deeply held human feeling”: it is not an unmediated confession, because there is no such thing as an unmediated confession—free, that is, of introjected mediations. The speaker in a lyric poem is always a pattern, a model of subjectivity constructed on the basis of inherited schemas and placed under the gaze of others.⁷⁷ It continues to be a persona and displays itself on the page in an implicit or explicit performance: self-exhibition and self-fashioning never disappear. But the awareness that lyric, like literature in general, always arises out of social patterns should not lead us to forget two fundamental differences: that not all patterns are the same, and that they have a different historical index, a different point of emergence, a different kairos. The personae of Gesellschaftslyrik, transcendental autobiographism, and differential autobiographism do not share the same nature. The paradigm of differential autobiographism is much closer to the biographical contingency of a private persona than the other two, because in the modern era the right of individuals to perceive, develop, and display their subjective difference is greater than what it was in the past. Differential autobiographism is the literary equivalent of this historical process.

The sign and symptom of this shift is the introduction into poetry of allusions, anecdotes, and private mental associations. In poems like “Returning a Lost Child” or “The hope of even seeing you again” the first person seems to talk to itself with a degree of solipsistic closure that is inconceivable for the schemas of transcendental autobiographism. In “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1833), one of the culminating theoretical texts of the Romantic lyric paradigm, John Stuart Mill argues that the sign of true poetry is its solipsistic and antitheatrical nature:

Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling, confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols, which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavouring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action.

All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy. It may be said that poetry which is printed on hot-pressed paper and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a soliloquy in full dress, and on the stage. It is so: but there is nothing absurd in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing. What we have said to ourselves, we may tell to others afterwards; what we have said or done in solitude, we may voluntarily reproduce when we know that other eyes are upon us. But no trace of consciousness that any eyes are upon us must be visible in the work itself.… When the expression of [the poet’s] emotions, or of his thoughts tinged by emotions, is tinged also by that purpose, by that desire of making an impression upon another mind, then it ceases to be poetry, and becomes eloquence.⁷⁸

For Mill, lyric poetry is the antithesis of oratory and theater, which are designed to speak explicitly to an audience, to persuade or seduce it; poetry seeks instead to reproduce the conditions of soliloquy, canceling out the presence of others. Taken literally, these ideas are easily contested. Mill himself incorporates a decisive objection into his argument: poetry never completely abolishes public mediations, for the good reason that no private soliloquy circulates in a printed book. It may therefore be said that “poetry which is printed on hot-pressed paper and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a soliloquy in full dress and on the stage.” Hence, his reference to soliloquy should not be understood in a literal and factual sense; it should be understood in a stylistic sense. Although intended to be read, poetry acts as though its discourse was removed from the gaze of others, in accordance with a rhetoric that is diametrically opposed to that governing theater and oratory, which are designed as outward facing, to communicate something in the public sphere. Now, if we historicized Mill’s argument, we would notice that this is not the case for all periods: the posture of the subject who speaks in Gesellschaftslyrik and in transcendental autobiographism is always outward facing; every point of its rhetoric is constructed to be understood by someone; the connections of its discourse never become entirely private. The theory of poetry in “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” is therefore not valid in all periods: it describes the new way of saying I and the new attitude of differential autobiographism that Romanticism had made possible.

This brings us to the second point: the models of lyric subjectivity have a different historical index; they represent different epochs. This is why the Romantic paradigm cannot be dismissed purely as a grand collective illusion. The fact that during the same years authors who differ greatly from each other, such as Hegel, Wordsworth, and Leopardi, came to think that subjective poetry is self-expression, and the fact that over the nineteenth century the idea solidified that Romantic poetry introduced a rupture between two epochs are not errors but symptoms: they indicate that a new model of subjectivity was being born during those decades. In Gesellschaftslyrik, the speaker does not have a true identity. In the poetry of Petrarch, as in that of Catullus, Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Donne, the speaker brings a personal biography into the text, or at least has a subjective density that the selves in the Gesellschaftslyrik do not possess; but its speech passes through transcendental structures that are still thick and filtering and that tend to transform contingency into an exemplum. Differential autobiography corresponds instead to the modern (that is, Romantic and post-Romantic) notion of subjectivity—a subjectivity that has conquered the right to publicly display associations of ideas, minimal anecdotes, and mental transitions that in other eras would be inexpressible. In doing so, it narrows the insurmountable distance between the persona who says I on the page and the real individual who puts his or her name on the book. The theoretical understanding that there is no such thing as unmediated self-expression should not cancel out the awareness that the quality of the mediation changes over time. Gesellschaftslyrik and transcendental autobiographism also survive in the modern age, but the paradigm that corresponds to the modern way of understanding subjectivity and its relationship with self-display, self-fashioning, and the presence of others is differential autobiographism.

Three Historical Thresholds

This shift is perceptible in “The Infinite” starting from the opening. “Always dear to me was this solitary hill | And this hedge, which such a large part | Of the farthest horizon excludes from my gaze.” Petrarch’s speaker tells his own story to an ideal community of listeners, according to a model that is implicitly theatrical—like a character giving a monologue in front of an audience. The first person in “The Infinite” adopts, in part, the rhetoric of private writings, making use of allusions that recall hints typical of diaries, which can only be deciphered entirely in reference to the lived experience. This aspect receives a great deal of emphasis from commentators on “The Infinite.” And yet these signs of immediacy belong to a formal system still largely mediated by conventions. Leopardi’s poetic vocabulary uses words that are far from the degree zero of communicative discourse—words that are loaded with the past and literature. His technique for composing poems is equally mediated: Leopardi usually wrote a first draft in prose and then coolly versified it—an approach that is antithetical to the idea of lyric poetry as an unmediated soliloquy and of style as spontaneous self-expression. If we were then to pose a truly radical question, we would have to ask why a poet who is simply expressing himself would do so in hendecasyllables? Why would he observe rules of meter, thereby preserving the traces of an ancient ritual? It might seem like a naive question, one that generally remains unanswered or is answered by citing the findings of literary history, and yet these apparently naive questions harbor essential issues.⁷⁹ Interestingly enough, they can be found in the Zibaldone:

Usage has established that the poet write in verse. It is not of the essence that the poet write in verse. It is not of the essence of poetry or of its language and mode of expressing things. Of course, since this language and mode, and the things the poet says, are completely different from the ordinary, it is very appropriate, and extremely useful for his effects, that he employs a rhythm, etc., that is different from vernacular and common usage, in which things are expressed as they are, or as they are usually considered to be in life. I leave to one side the usefulness of harmony, etc. But in essence, in itself, poetry is not tied to verse.⁸⁰

A common move in literary criticism, as we have seen, is to compare the poem with the passage from the Zibaldone in which Leopardi describes his perception of the infinite. Quite rightly, the commentators insist more on differences than similarities: “the work of the imagination that is rationally explained in prose is represented in poetry by Leopardi with immediacy and accents of extraordinary novelty, like someone discovering an unexplored region of the soul”;⁸¹ “in the first case, we have a point of view that is critical and reflective in character, in the second … evocative in character.”⁸² However, the Zibaldone is not the only work that rewrites the ideas of “The Infinite” in prose; in fact, there is a passage in the notes for his autobiographical novel that closely resembles the text of the idyll. Here it is again:

my observations on the plurality of worlds and the nothingness of us and this earth and on the greatness and force of nature that we measure by torrents, etc., which are nothing on this globe, which is nothing in the world, and awakened by a voice calling me to dinner so that our lives seem like a nothingness to me and time and famous names and all of history, etc., on the biggest and most admirable buildings that do no more than roughen up this little globe the rough things that can’t be seen from slightly above and slightly far away, but from slightly above our globe appears to be smooth.…⁸³

When comparing these lines with the poem, one instantly notices the syntactic resemblance between the final part of the prose passage and lines 11–13 of “The Infinite” (“and what comes to me is the eternal, | And the seasons dead, and the present | And alive one, and the sound of it”): a sign that the syntax of the idyll sometimes closely follows the waves of thought, so much so that its paratactic shattering competes with the disorder of the notes, which are written in a form verging on interior monologue. Nevertheless, the logical and hypotactic development of lines 9–11 is incomparably more mediated and constructed than the corresponding prose passage. The form of the prose is a note that remains faithful to a stream of consciousness, to an interior monologue, whereas the syntax of “The Infinite,” however evocative, ultimately organizes the discourse with a view to public understanding, because in 1819 it was impossible for an Italian lyric poem written in a serious tone to be constructed as a jumbled accumulation of thoughts.

A century later, of course, it would have been normal to read something of this sort in a poem. I randomly pick up Ragazzo (Boy) by Piero Jahier, published in 1919. Prose is mixed in with the verses. A high school student is attending a class. All of a sudden, a woman, his housemaid, comes to warn him that his father has left the house forebodingly. Knowing that his father means to die, the boy escapes from school and sets off running to find him. After a page of prose with no paragraph breaks, the boy’s race through the streets is described in verse:

Correre

e perché invece tutte le cose inutili così lucide dal ponte

campana che mesce mezzogiorno sporgendosi dal campanile

scola l’acqua dalla pala il renaiolo

penna di vapore sul fischio che si sentirà

Correre

tra i tanti visi frotteggianti forse uno che l’ha visto passare stamani:

non mi riconosci se l’hai incontrato

non vedi che sono il suo bambino

perché ti dimentichi il viso che va a morire.⁸⁴

Running

and why instead all the useless things so shiny from the bridge

bell that pours out noon sticking out from the belltower

the sandman drains the water from his shovel

plume of steam on the whistle that will be heard

Running

among all the faces looking out maybe one that saw him pass this morning;

don’t you recognize me if you met him

don’t you see that I’m his child

why do you forget the face that goes off to die?

While it is true that Ragazzo is not easy to assign to a specific genre, because it is a prose poem, these verses are very similar to poems Jahier published earlier, and to many other poems that appeared in Italy in the same years. In the most well known of the Italian collections to come out in 1919, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Allegria di naufragi (Joy of Shipwrecks),⁸⁵ we find the poem “Viaggio” (“Voyage”) whose dispositio jumps from one sentence to the other without connections:

Non mi posso accasare.

Ad ogni nuovo clima, mi ritrovo di averne già saputo.

In quali tempi andati?

Sempre me ne stacco forestiero.

Tornato nascendo da epoche troppo vissute.

Cerco un paese innocente.⁸⁶

I can’t find a home for myself.

At each new land, I find myself already knowing about it.

In what times gone by?

I always come away a stranger.

Returned being born from epochs too long lived.

I seek an innocent country.

Certain syntactical constructions and sudden juxtapositions that in 1819 might have been acceptable at most for jotting down some notes were now part of the Italian language of poetry in 1919. This occurred in all the Western literatures. Consider the ending of one of the most famous poems written in English in 1919, published the following year:

[…] De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled

Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear

In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits

Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.

White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,

And an old man driven by the Trades

To a sleepy corner.

Tenants of the house,

Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.⁸⁷

T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” is a dramatic monologue and not a lyric poem in the narrow sense, but the way the speaker’s thoughts are associated is certainly much less structured than what was permitted by the conventions of the previous century. Assuming that the last verse is what ties the explicit to the incipit (“Here I am, an old man in a dry month, | Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain”), what is the link between the two preceding sentences? And the names mentioned—what do they refer to? In 1819, when Keats was writing his great odes and “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” Shelley his “Ode to the West Wind,” and Byron was publishing “Mazeppa” and “Ode on Venice,” the finale of “Gerontion” would have been incomprehensible—both its literal meaning (and it still is for readers who are nonspecialists or lack critical commentary) and its significance as an artistic act. This means that the texts by Jahier, Ungaretti, and Eliot support the idea that poetry has more to do with unrelated subjectivity than “The Infinite” does. For poetry to lose its public mediations, the poet needs to escape from conventions and free himself or herself from the rituals of meter, lexicon, syntax, and rhetoric inherited from the past.

In other words, the birth of modern poetry was not an instantaneous change but a slow metamorphosis, a process that took place in three stages. The first changed the way of perceiving poetry. The modern concept of the lyric was born in the second half of the sixteenth century, later spreading throughout Europe between the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. This shift included the nascent idea that writing in verse coincides with lyric poetry, and that the lyric is concerned with the writer’s self-expression. The second transformed the way poetic personas were constructed in writing. A new type of autobiographism emerged, which did not cancel out the other models but gradually gained hegemony, overlapping with the development of genres that gave voice to the lived experiences of writers: modern autobiography, which, after the success of Rousseau’s Confessions (1782–1789), spread quickly all over Europe; and the novel of the intellectual hero, with its archetype in the character of Saint-Preux in Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Heloise (1761),⁸⁸ which came to full maturity with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Lyric poetry also moved closer to the writing of experience. The poetic subject was constructed in a different way, presenting itself increasingly as a differential individual, as the avatar of a biographical subject that talks about itself, reducing the mediations that in earlier poetry had transformed a private, individual story into a public, exemplary story. But although the content of poetry changed in the first half of the nineteenth century, it would take at least a century for the form to transmute in consequence. The third change, involving style, was the slowest, since the metamorphosis of poetic form lasted throughout the nineteenth century and only came to an end with the first avant-garde movements of the twentieth century. This was when poets truly gained in principle the possibility of expressing themselves without the constraints that the Romantic poetics proclaimed but only partially achieved in the poems of their time. “The Infinite” is a new poem because of its subject matter, because of the way Leopardi says I, because of the poetic persona he constructs. The formal novelties are instead embryonic and can be grasped above all in retrospect, by a gaze informed by the literature of the twentieth century. These novelties are the harbinger of a transformation that would take place during the following decades and change the form of European poetry with a radicality that Romantic poetry experienced only in part.

1. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, critical edition by Emilio Peruzzi (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981), 271. All translations of poems in this chapter are by Zakiya Hanafi, unless otherwise noted.

2. The only confusion regards quella (“that,” feminine singular) in line 5: some critics believe it refers to tanta parte (“such a large part”); according to the traditional interpretation, however, which remains the most probable, it indicates the siepe (“hedge”) mentioned in line 2. See Antonio Baldini, “Questa e quella …,” Corriere della Sera, February 7, 1950; Riccardo Bacchelli, “Sugli aggettivi determinativi dell’ ‘Infinito,’ ” Letterature moderne 1, no. 2 (1950): 56–57.

3. In Italian, free hendecasyllable refers to a series of verses with eleven syllables that are not connected by a fixed rhyme scheme.

4. This refers to “Letta la vita dell’Alfieri scritta da esso” (“Reading the Life of Vittorio Alfieri Written by Himself”), composed in 1817 and accompanied by a significant comment: “First sonnet composed all through the night before November 27, 1817, staying in bed, before falling asleep. A few hours earlier, I finished reading the life of Alfieri, and a few minutes earlier, still in bed, I had criticized his facile rhyming, telling myself that no sonnet would ever come out of my pen.” Giacomo Leopardi, Poesie e prose, vol. 1, Poesie, ed. Rolando Damiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 381.

5. Initially, “La ricordanza” (later, “Alla luna”) had fourteen lines. They would be changed to sixteen in the posthumous edition of the Canti (1845), edited by Antonio Ranieri.

6. See the introduction by Ugo Dotti to the edition of the Canti that he also edited (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1993), 54.

7. Giacomo Leopardi, “Ricordi d’infanzia e d’adolescenza,” in Poesie e prose, vol. 2, Prose, ed. Rolando Damiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 1190 (emphasis added).

8. Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone di pensieri (1817–1832); English translation, Zibaldone, trans. Michael Caesar and Franco D’Intino (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 171, July 12–23, 1820 (emphasis added).

9. Luigi Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” in Leopardi e i segnali dell’infinito (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985), 97.

10. Ibid.

11. The same technique is used two other times in the Canti: in the passage of “La sera del dì di festa” (“The Evening of the Holiday”) where Leopardi describes the solitary song of a workman returning home from his evening out and in the passage in “Le ricordanze” (“The Recollections”) that mentions the chiming of the bell tower carried by the wind: Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010), 111 and 183. See Franco Brioschi, La poesia senza nome (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980), 42, and Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” 114.

12. The accents all fall on the eighth and tenth syllables: érmo còlle (“solitary hill”), tànta pàrte (“such a large part”), guàrdo esclùde (“my view excludes”). See Mario Fubini, Metrica e poesia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962), 67.

13. The siepe (“hedge”) of line 2 has no precedents in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, but it is a typical feature of the bucolic landscape. On the other hand, the ultimo orizzonte (“farthest horizon”) in line 3 appeared earlier in Petrarch (Canzoniere, 28, line 35). The ermo colle (“solitary hill”) appears in line 1 of two sonnets by Galeazzo di Tarsia. See Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” 99–100, and the comment by Francesco Flora (1937) to Leopardi, in Canti, ed. Francesco Flora (Milan: Mondadori, 1945, 172).

14. Franco Ferrucci, “Lo specchio dell’infinito,” Strumenti critici 4 (1970): 192.

15. Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” 99.

16. See Fubini, Metrica e poesia, 67.

17. Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” 100–101.

18. See the comment by Enrico M. Fusco in Giacomo Leopardi, Canti (Bologna: Cappelli, 1939), and Blasucci “I segnali dell’infinito,” in Leopardi e i segnali dell’infinito, 124.

19. Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” 118; “I segnali dell’infinito,” 129.

20. An anthology of critical responses to the poem can be found in Interminati spazi sovrumani silenzi. “Un infinito commento.” Critici, filosofi e scrittori alla ricerca dell’ “Infinito” di Leopardi, edited and with a critical essay by Vincenzo Guarracino (Grottammare: Stamperia dell’Arancio, 2001).

21. See I canti di Giacomo Leopardi nelle traduzioni inglesi. Saggio bibliografico e antologia delle versioni nel mondo anglosassone, ed. Ghan Singh (Recanati: Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani, 1990).

22. Adriano Tilgher, La filosofia di Leopardi (Rome: Edizioni di religio, 1940), 149.

23. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, with introduction and commentary by Mario Fubini, new edition in collaboration with Emilio Bigi (Turin: Loescher, 1964), 115.

24. Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” 104.

25. Leopardi, Canti, ed. Mario Fubini and Emilio Bigi, 8–13.

26. Ibid., 17.

27. Ibid., 20.

28. Victor Hugo, “Préface,” in Les Contemplations (1830–1856), in Œuvres poétiques, vol. 2, ed. Pierre Albouy (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 481.

29. Fubini, Metrica e poesia, 65–70.

30. Brioschi, La poesia senza nome, 104.

31. Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” 99.

32. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946); English translation, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 21.

33. Aristotle, Poetics, 2.1448a.1–5, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),

34. Aristotle, Poetics, 2.1448a.19–23.

35. See Erich Auerbach, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spätantike und im Mittelalter (1958); English translation, Literary Language and Its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. Ralph Manheim (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 37.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid., 31.

38. Ibid., chap. 18.

39. The concept of partage du sensible comes from Jacques Rancière, La Mésentente (1995); English translation, Disagreement, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 24, but see especially Le Partage du sensible (2000); English translation, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004). Following his own path, Rancière comes to conclusions that are similar to Auerbach’s. In his later work Rancière picks up on the reference to Auerbach. See Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scènes du régime esthétique de l’art (2011); English translation, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London: Verso, 2013), xi.

40. Thomas G. Pavel, L’Art de l’éloignement: Essai sur l’imagination classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 273–274.

41. Thomas G. Pavel, La Pensée du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 111; English rev. ed., The Lives of the Novel: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 72–73.

42. Roland Barthes, “L’Effet de réel” (1968); English translation, “The Reality Effect,” reprinted in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141–148.

43. Karl Maurer, Giacomo Leopardis “Canti” und die Auflösung der lyrischen Genera (Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 1957).

44. Marco Santagata, “Dagli idilli all’idillio,” in Quella celeste naturalezza (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994), 135–169.

45. See Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito.’ ”

46. The union between contingency and seriousness is evident in “The Infinite,” “The Evening of the Holiday,” and “To the Moon” (even more after the variant that appears in the 1845 edition of the Canti). The other idylls, which are more tied to genre conventions, have been judged otherwise: “Il sogno” (“The Dream”) recalls the medieval genre of the vision; “La vita solitaria” (“The Solitary Life”), and “Frammento XXXVII” (“Fragment XXXVII”) recall various subgenres of bucolic poetry.

47. Giacomo Leopardi, “Disegni letterari”, in Prose e poesie, vol. 2, Prose, ed. Rolando Damiani (Milan: Mondadori, 1988), 1218.

48. Aristotle, Poetics, 9.1451b.9–10.

49. I write about this more extensively in Guido Mazzoni, Theory of the Novel, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 76–79.

50. The only exception is an isolated, transitional composition—the verse epistle “Al Conte Carlo Pepoli” (“To Count Carlo Pepoli”), written in March 1826.

51. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 54.

52. On Gesellschaftslyrik in medieval poetry, see Claudio Giunta, Versi a un destinatario: Saggio sulla poesia italiana del Medioevo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002), chap. 4 (“Sulla lirica”).

53. Paul Allen Miller, Lyric Texts and Lyric Consciousness: The Birth of a Genre from Archaic Greece to Augustan Rome (London: Routledge, 1994), 3–4.

54. See Giunta, Versi a un destinatario, 386–392.

55. See Roland Greene, Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), chap. 1; Marco Santagata, Dal sonetto al canzoniere (Padua: Liviana, 1989), 131ff.; I frammenti dell’anima (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992); and Introduzione a Francesco Petrarca, “Canzoniere” (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), liv.

56. See Wolfgang Rösler, “Persona reale o persona poetica? L’interpretazione dell”io’ nella lirica greca arcaica,” Quaderni urbinati di cultura classica, nuova serie 19, no. 1 (1985): 131–144.

57. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 10.

58. See Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), chap. 4; and John R. Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1912–1967 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973).

59. Louise Glück, “Returning a Lost Child,” in Firstborn (1968), reprinted in Poems 1962–2012 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 11.

60. Louise Glück, “Formaggio,” in Vita Nova (1999), reprinted in Poems 1962–2012, 375–376.

61. Eugenio Montale, “La speranza di pure rivederti,” in L’opera in versi, ed. Rosanna Bettarini e Gianfranco Contini (Turin: Einaudi, 1980), 138; English translation “The hope of even seeing you again,” in Collected Poems 1920–1954, 2nd rev. ed., trans. and ed. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 196.

62. Eugenio Montale, “Due sciacalli al guinzaglio” (1950), in Il secondo mestiere: Arte, musica, società, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1996), 1489–1493.

63. Ibid., 1493.

64. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

65. The Odes of Horace, trans. Jeffrey H. Kaimowitz (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 47.

66. Dante Alighieri, Rime, ed. Gianfranco Contini (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1980): 35–36; English translation Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the “Vita Nuova,” ed. Teodolinda Barolini, trans. Richard Lansing (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 121.

67. John Donne, “Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt,” in John Donne’s Poetry, ed. Donald R. Dickson (New York: Norton, 2007). This sonnet circulated in manuscripts. It was discovered by Edmund Gosse in the Westmoreland Manuscript and included in Herbert J. C. Grierson’s modern edition of Donne’s works: The Poems of John Donne, Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts, with Introduction and Commentary, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912).

68. See Robert Cecil Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 93–142; and Dennis Flynn, John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

69. Gianfranco Contini, “Preliminari alla lingua di Petrarca (1951),” in Varianti e altra linguistica (Turin: Einaudi, 1979), 178.

70. Santagata, Introduzione, lxx.

71. Ibid., lxxi.

72. Contini, “Preliminari alla lingua di Petrarca.”

73. Santagata, Introduzione, lv.

74. See Étienne Gilson, “La scolastique et l’esprit classique,” in Les Idées et les Lettres (Paris: Vrin, 1955), 254–261; Louis Van Delft, Le Moraliste classique: Essai de définition et de typologie (Genève: Droz, 1982), 138ff.; and Lidiya Ginzburg, O psikhologicheskoi proze (1971, 1977); English translation, On Psychological Prose, trans. Judson Rosengrant (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 13–14 and 271.

75. Rösler, “Persona reale o persona poetica?,” 132.

76. See Georg Simmel, “Die beiden Formen des Individualismus” (1901) in Georg Simmel: Gesamtausgabe, Band 7, ed. Rüdiger Kramme, Angela Rammstedt, and Otthein Rammstedt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), 49–56. This dichotomy and the Romantic idea of differential individualism were then picked up on and developed in many ways, especially by Richard Sennett and Charles Taylor. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977); and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

77. Werner Wolf, “The Lyric: Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualisation,” in Theory into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric, ed. Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 21–56; Culler, Theory of the Lyric.

78. John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1833), in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. John M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto / London: University of Toronto Press / Routledge, 1981), 348–349.

79. See Culler, Theory of the Lyric, chap. 4.

80. Leopardi, Zibaldone, 1695–1696, September 14, 1821.

81. Leopardi, Canti, ed. Mario Fubini and Emilio Bigi, 115.

82. Blasucci, “Paragrafi sull’ ‘Infinito,’ ” 116.

83. Leopardi, “Ricordi d’infanzia e d’adolescenza,” 1190 (emphasis added).

84. Piero Jahier, Ragazzo (Rome: La Voce, 1919), 8–9.

85. In the 1919 edition, the book was still called Allegria di naufragi (Joy of Shipwrecks). It would become L’allegria (The Joy) starting from the 1931 edition. See also Giuseppe Ungaretti, Allegria, trans. Geoffrey Brock (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2020).

86. Giuseppe Ungaretti, L’allegria, ed. Cristiana Maggi Romano (Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 1982), 233. “Viaggio” was not reprinted in the later editions of L’allegria.

87. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Gerontion,” in The Poems of T. S. Eliot, Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), 33. “Gerontion” was published in Ara Vos Prec (1920) and Poems (1920).

88. See Victor Brombert, The Intellectual Hero (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1961), 14.