Canzone in fourteen verses of varied length, Il pensiero dominante (Dominant Thought) was perhaps composed in the summer of 1832 in Florence, and first published in the Naples 1835 edition.

It is part of, with the Consalvo and the three subsequent Cantos, the so called “Aspasia cycle”, the Cantos dedicated to his love for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti. It is the most “positive” of these Cantos, in which a disquisition on his own subjectivity (no longer linked to “idyllic” elements, as for the two preceding Cantos, La quiete dopo la tempesta and Il sabato del villaggio) and the exaltation of the thought of love (“Most sweet” and “puissant”, v. 1), have the effect of pushing Leopardi into a rejection of the squalid present and a vindication of his own personality, with aspects that announce the Palinodia and La Ginestra (Il pensiero dominante is indeed the Canto that inaugurates that which Walter Binni has defined “Leopardi’s new poetics”):

Di questa età superba,

che di vote speranze si nutrica,

vaga di ciance, e di virtù nemica;

stolta, che l’utile chiede,ùe inutile la vita quindi più sempre divenir non vede;

maggior mi sento. ... (vv. 59-65)

The thought of love, albeit considered a “dream and obvious error” (v. 111), shows itself capable of transforming the perception  of the poet’s life, and to “bestow nobility” (which has led to the fair consideration of a modern stilnovo). And this “capacity” of amorous sentiment almost seems to leave him surprised, incredulous.

Che mondo mai, che nova

immensità, che paradiso è quello

là dove spesso il tuo stupendo incanto

parmi innalzar! ... (vv. 100-4)

A consideration comparable to the one contained in  Pensiero dominante Leopardi made in Pensiero LXXXII, in which love is considered to be the only sentiment capable, in the modern world, of provoking in man that “great experience of himself” necessary if he is to live a full and dignified life, “revealing him to himself, determining his opinion of himself”.