Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica
Twice did Leopardi attempt to get involved in the contemporary debate on Romanticism, in defence of Classicism; unfortunately his works were not accepted by either the “Biblioteca Italiana” or the “Spettatore italiano”, and remained unpublished till 1906.
Of 1816 is his Letter to the messers compilers of the Biblioteca Italiana, in answer to the essay by Madame de Staël Sulla maniera e l’utilità della traduzioni/The manner and use of translations, in which the Italians are invited to read modern European literature: “useless advice”, for Leopardi, given that Italian literature is the closest to the literature that is universally valid: the Greek and the Latin.
In 1818 Leopardi further extended his poetic and aesthetic reflections composing (between January and August) the Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (observations on romantic poetry), a polemic answer to Osservazioni del Cavalier Lodovico di Breme sulla poesia moderna (Lodovico di Breme’s observations on modern poetry), published in the “Spettatore italiano” in January. Here Leopardi expresses some capital ideas for his own speculative and poetic experience: in particular, the fundamental opposition between the concepts of “nature” and “civilization”, to which are tied on the one hand those of “antiquity” and “childhood” (because “that which the ancient were, we have all been ... I mean children”), on the other those of “modernity” and “reason”; in poetry, both the Classicists and the Romantics meet with favour: if the first seek poetry close to nature and illusions, “simple”, expressed with the “celestial naturalness” of the ancient (the poet “must beguil and beguiling imitate nature, and imitating nature give delight”), the second are fiercely condemned by Leopardi (close to the positions of the European and not the Italian Romantics, progressivists and spiritualists) because they search for an art that is “current”, “useful”, intellectualistic, psychological, “sentimental” and “pathetic”.
The edition that is the point of reference is by Ottavio Besomi and others, Casagrande, Bellinzona 1988.
