Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry

G. Singh

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813188157
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

In this first detailed and comprehensive account of Leopardi's theory of poetry, G. Singh assesses both the literary and critical attainments of a poet whose eminence ranks him with Dante and Petrarch. Singh's analysis, which employs extensive reference to Leopardi's work in order to illustrate the author's own comments, sets forth Leopardi's views on the larger questions of tradition, inspiration, and the imagination in poetry. Later chapters are concerned with the more specific matters of the poetic image, style, and language.

CHAPTER ONE

Leopardi’s Critical Method and Principles

NO POET in the history of Italian literature occupied himself with the theory of poetry so much as Leopardi; and, indeed, “few men have given so much hard thought to the matter.”¹ As a poetic theorist, he not only compares well with Goethe, Wordsworth, and Coleridge on the one hand, and Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire on the other, but in virtue of his classical learning and philological scholarship, which he brought to bear on certain aspects of the literary and poetic theory, especially the linguistic and stylistic aspects, he easily surpasses them all. Moreover, the range of the literary and philosophical reference within which his critical mind worked was not limited to ancient thought and literature; it embraced modern literature and modern thought as well. Besides French and Italian literatures, which he had thoroughly mastered, he was also fairly well acquainted with the major literary works in English, German, and Spanish. Hence for his “incomparable literary education” alone, leaving aside the still more important fact that he was “the greatest Italian writer of modern times,”² Leopardi’s views on the art of poetry as well as on individual authors and works deserve our serious consideration. Indeed, Operette Morali, “Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica,” Epistolario, and, above all, Zibaldone constitute a body of criticism as remarkable for its depth and soundness as for its range and variety.

In Zibaldone and elsewhere not only is Leopardi uninterested in expounding any systematic philosophy of art or poetry, but he does not even pretend to throw any new light on the revaluation of any particular author or question in literary history. His main interest is to register impressions and reactions in the course of his loving study of both ancient and modern literary masterpieces and to ponder on their implications. Having little or no use for a priori rules and formulas, Leopardi considered each work of art to be itself furnishing, to a discerning mind, the very basis and criteria, according to which it ought to be judged. Invented by “poor grammarians,” rules serve to produce not art but artifice; and while art “conserves the variety and delight of nature, artifice, which is the food of reason, is monotonous and it is merely the product of ‘dry’ curiosity.”³ Hence his condemnation of literary academies like the Della Crusca as being detrimental to the progress of arts. All great poets among the Greeks, for instance, had written before Aristotle, as all the Latin poets before or at the same time as Horace. As against academies and systems of rules and formulas, Leopardi favors the possession or cultivation of good taste both among the individuals and the nations.⁴ Homer, who wrote before any rules were formed, did not dream, says Leopardi, that from what was so fresh and original in his work, rules and formulas would be derived that would prevent others from following his own example, i.e., from being “true, irregular, great, and original like him.”⁵ Hence Leopardi’s attitude to preestablished rules and canons governing creative arts, and even the very science or art of criticism, and his desire to assert the autonomy of both creative activity and the critical function is more or less the same as that of Coleridge, though he had never heard the latter’s name. “Could a rule be given from without,” said Coleridge, “poetry would cease to be poetry, and sink into a mechanical art.”⁶ Instead of assessing the literary worth of a work merely in terms of the degree to which it measures up to certain preconceived notions or standards derived from past models, one should, Leopardi emphasized, try to enter into the very spirit of a given work, both in so far as it is different from and in so far as it is similar to other masterpieces. And this one can do not so much by analyzing the milieu or the personality of the artist, as by recreating and reexperiencing the spirit and meaning of that work of art within the bounds of one’s own imagination, sensibility, and culture, or by transferring it into ourselves.⁷ For all his respect for the ancient classics, and especially for Homer, “the father and the perpetual principle of all the poets of the world,”⁸ Leopardi never fails to stress the link between the reader’s or the critic’s inner world of sensibility and experience (both of life and of other works of art and poetry), and his ability to judge a particular work of art. It is in this sense that one can say of Leopardi that he combines the sense of tradition with the spirit of modernity. And tradition does not mean blind subservience or uncritical acceptance of the classics, any more than modernity means a cloak for inane extravagances or innovations, indulged for their own sakes. One proof of Leopardi’s critical liberalism and independence of judgment is the fact that in turning to ancient critics, literary historians, and theorists he does not always follow the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle, but quotes minor poets, historians, and orators as well.

Leopardi’s theory of poetry, like all theories of poetry more or less, is based on certain fundamental assumptions regarding the role of memory, imagination, sentiments, and sensibility as well as the nature and function of poetry itself. It is inseparably bound up with his particular view of life, with what may be called his philosophical system, which has its roots in eighteenth-century French thought and literature. “All great poetry,” says T. S. Eliot, “gives the illusion of a view of life. When we enter into the world of Homer, or Sophocles, or Virgil, or Dante or Shakespear, we incline to believe that we are apprehending something that can be expressed intellectually; for every precise emotion tends towards intellectual formation.”⁹ Not only in Leopardi’s poetry, but even in Leopardi’s theory of poetry we have something like this illusion. His never-failing sense of the fundamental unity between art and life happily prevented him from divorcing the aesthetic pleasure or emotion from the moral and intellectual aspects of poetry, from divorcing form from content, and contemplating them in isolation.

Some, Fubini for one, have found Leopardi’s union of the aesthetic with the moral a weakness in his theory. In Leopardi, Fubini tells us, “an aesthetic problem is transformed . . . into a moral problem: the primitive spontaneity of true poetry, which Leopardi exalts, and whose unique model he sees in his Greeks, is mistaken by him for every other form of spontaneous life which reason falsifies and mortifies.”¹⁰ The vital humanity of Leopardi’s attitude to poetry lies mainly in this: that he identified poetry with every spontaneous form and manifestation of life.¹¹ In other words, there is, in this attitude, something at once more human and more philosophical than one usually finds in a purely literary or critical attitude. Defining the function of a philosopher, which in his view cannot altogether be separated from that of a literary critic or a poet,¹² Leopardi notes:

Naturally and of necessity [a philosopher] looks for a thread in his consideration of things. It is impossible for him to be content with isolated notions and truths. If he had contented himself with these, his philosophy would have been the most trivial and the most wretched, and would not have yielded any result. The aim of philosophy (in the widest sense of the term) is to discover the causes of truths. These causes are to be found only in the interrelationships among these truths, and they are to be found by means of generalization. Do we not know that the faculty of generalization alone constitutes the thinker? Do we not admit that philosophy consists of speculation on these relationships?¹³

It is in relating the specific problems of literary criticism and poetic theory to the general problems of life, in deriving from the criticism of life not only the material for his poetry, but also the values and criteria by which that poetry ought to be judged, that Leopardi’s merit as a philosophic critic or theorist of poetry lies. His absorbing concern is not with the form or technique of poetry, though one of the paramount qualities of his own poetry is its formal and prosodic excellence, nor even with style in the abstract sense, though his own style (both prose and poetry) is uniformly superb, but with poetry in its purest essence. But instead of defining this essence in metaphorical terms—such as “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge . . . the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science” (Wordsworth), or “the identity of all other knowledges, the blossom of all other systems of thought . . . the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things” (Shelley)—terms and definitions which, for all their rhapsodical charm, leave the essence of poetry as much in the vague as ever, Leopardi tries to approach this essence not in order to discover what it is per se, but in order to identify and characterize the qualities common to all great poetry, and, as far as possible, to try to account for them. Hence, whatever amount of interdependence there might be between Leopardi’s poetry and his theory of poetry, it does not constitute exactly the same sort of relationship as one finds between, say Shelley’s poetry and his Defence of Poetry. Of the latter, W. P. Ker says that “it is not itself poetry and Shelley would not have us think so. But it is one mode in which he expresses a theory which is expressed poetically in Prometheus and Adonais. The prose meaning of the Defence is the poetical meaning of Asia and Urania.”¹⁴ Now this cannot be said of the meaning of the Canti and the general critical import of Leopardi’s poetic theory, which consists, for the most part, of factually plain and prosaic observations concerning the art of poetry treated almost as a science. The content of Leopardi’s poetic theory is largely intellectual rather than emotional, and it is constructive only in so far as it is analytical. Behind each and everything he condemns or exalts there is always the specific prose-reason why he does so; and it is his own critical sensibility, rather than any a priori rules or standards, which molds his judgments and reactions. Appreciation and criticism, evaluation and analysis are not two processes divided into tight compartments, as unfortunately they sometimes are, but two complementary aspects of the same process in Leopardi’s poetic and critical theory. And the language he employs is mostly a language consisting of direct and factual remarks, and, as far as possible, shunning rather than, like Goethe or the English romantics, indulging in mystical and emotive observations.

If, however, Leopardi does sometimes use the metaphorical language while talking of poetry, it is not so much in order to adorn or mystify, as to clarify and drive home a particular truth. For instance, while differentiating between poetic vocabulary and scientific vocabulary, he observes:

It is the duty of poets and writers (who create belles lettres) to cover as far as possible the nudity of things, just as it is the duty of scientists and philosophers to reveal it. Hence, precise words suit the latter, and they are extremely unsuitable for the former. . . . To a scientist the more precise and more expressive of an idea in all its nudity the words are, the more convenient they are. On the contrary, to a poet and to a man of letters the more vague and the more expressive of uncertain ideas and of a large number of ideas the words are, the better.¹⁵

The metaphorical phrase, “to cover the nudity of things,” makes the poet’s thought and its various implications more clear and impressive than an analytically factual statement would have done, since the subject happens to be such a subtle and abstruse one as not so much the difference but the distinction between the poet’s language and the language of science. Moreover, the phrase “the nudity of things” does in itself embody a very rich and very typical concept of Leopardi’s. It does not mean the same thing as, for example, Tasso’s phrase “the naked material” in “Discorso dell’arte poetica,” material, as Tasso himself explains, “which has not yet received any quality from a poet’s or an orator’s artifice.” For Leopardi, on the other hand, the phrase means the reality of things as they are in themselves—a reality that is not simply less beautiful than poetic illusions, but also more restricted in its scope and relevance than it would be if charged with the pathos and power of illusions, which confer on it almost a symbolic value. Similarly, to take another example, Leopardi’s statement that an inexperienced person has always a more or less poetic character, and that he becomes prosaic with experience,¹⁶ sums up the opposition between worldly experience and poetic character, but not between experience and poetry, because the songs of experience are as legitimately poetry as the songs of innocence.

For all his concern with going to the very root of the problem, and for all his endowment as a thinker, which was certainly richer than that of a Wordsworth or a Shelley, Leopardi rarely strayed into the realm of metaphysical abstractions or metaphorical rhetoric while discussing poetry. To his lifelong study of poetry and his own experience as a poet, Leopardi added a long and close study of philology. This enabled him to compare the poetic validity of one word with that of another, the vocabulary of one poet or epoch with the vocabulary of another, and sometimes to distinguish between the nuances of meaning and poetic character of the same word in the same author occurring in different works or even in the different contexts of the same work. The poet’s art, for Leopardi, lies not so much in the invention of new things, or in communicating original ideas or truths, as in the manipulations of words in such a way as to be able to create a new effect, a new melody, a new style. Extremely dubious of the novelty of subject-matter or content as being a very useful or important factor in poetry, Leopardi emphasizes that poetry should move us by means of those very objects that we already knew before we started reading poetry, and should delight us through those very causes and circumstances, which are already familiar to us. The poet’s art consists in choosing

the most beautiful things among the known things, in newly and harmoniously . . . arranging the known things and adapting them to the capacity of the majority, newly clothing, adorning and embellishing them by means of the harmony of verse, metaphors, and every other splendor of style, in conferring light and nobility upon the unknown and ignoble things, in giving novelty to what is commonplace, in changing, as if by some magical incantation, the aspect of anything he happens to be dealing with; in taking, for instance, persons from nature and making them talk naturally, but nonetheless in such a way that the reader, while recognizing in that language the very language he is used to hear from such persons in real life in similar circumstances, may at the same time find it new and incomparably more beautiful than the ordinary language on account of the poetic ornaments, the new style, in a word, the new form and body which the poet has given it.¹⁷

This reads like a condensed but more lucid account of practically all the major arguments that parade through Wordsworth’s celebrated Preface as well as through Coleridge’s equally celebrated critical examination thereof.

Similarly Leopardi’s account of the nature and function of poetic imagination is far more simple and straightforward, without being less elucidating, than, say, sometimes that of Coleridge himself. “That synthetic and magical power,” says Coleridge, “to which I would exclusively appropriate the name of imagination . . . reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities . . . the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement.”¹⁸ And the chief gifts of imagination are “the sense of musical delight . . . together with the power of reducing multitude into unity of effect, and modifying a series of thoughts by some one predominant thought or feeling.”¹⁹ In comparison, Leopardi, regarding imagination as “the most fertile and most marvellous inventor of the most hidden relationships and harmonies,”²⁰ points out that a m...