Manzoni wrote the carme entitled In morte di Carlo Imbonati to exalt the virtues of the deceased companion of his mother, Giulia Beccaria, and to defend her against criticisms of her relationship with Imbonati. The poem was printed by the Parisian publisher Didot in 1806. Imbonati had already received the honour of an ode by Parini, L’educazione (1764), dedicated to him when he was a young man for his recovery from smallpox. The poem is in blank verse, and constructed as a “vision”, a common genre at the time, in which the poet imagines meeting characters and situations as though in a dream. Imbonati appears to the poet at night and sits at the edge of his bed. The solemn dialogue between them develops the theme of solitude, the noble and heroic solitude of the individual with high moral sentiments in a base and corrupt society (Dura è pel giusto solitario, il credi, / dura, e pur troppo disegual, la guerra / contra i perversi affratellati e molti, lines 132-134). The theme expresses aristocratic detachment from a world that has betrayed the libertarian and egalitarian illusions that the young Alessandro had previously held, and had shown in the Trionfo della libertà. The poem also contains his first definite statement on poetics, whose essential nucleus was maintained in his later formulations: poetry as a locus for intellectual reflection and moral meditation, from which the poet comunicates truth to the reader: for Manzoni, even before his religious conversion, this truth is both ethical and rational (Sentir, riprese, e meditar: di poco / esser contento: da la meta mai / non torcer gli occhi: conservar la mano / pura e la mente: de le umane cose / tanto sperimentar, quanto ti basti / per non curarle: non ti far mai servo: / non far tregua coi vili: il santo Vero / mai non tradir: né proferir mai verbo, / che plauda al vizio, o la virtù derida, lines 207-215). The carme was much admired by Foscolo, whose Sepolcri (1807) includes echoes of Manzoni’s poem.

First edition of the Carme for Imbonati [in Immagini della vita e dei tempi di Alessandro Manzoni, collected and illustrated by Marino Parenti, Florence, Sansoni, 1973, p. 58]