Literature & Literary Studies
September 2019
The Poetry of the Living
Leopardi among Us
by Antonio Prete
This book reconstructs and questions the figures that define Leopardi’s thought, examined in its profound ties with his poetry: the relationship between finiteness and the infinite, the lunar presence, the stellar element, the link between the breath of living beings and that of the earth, and between the individual and the cosmos. Other themes are the animal world, observed in its relationship of harmony with nature, the criticism of a civilization that is based on abstraction from the living being and its singularity, the role of imagination in knowledge, and the centrality of desire, which coincides with the very breath of existence. Embracing all the forms of Leopardi’s writing – verse, prose, the theoretical fragment, the letter, translation, philological research, the study of languages and the links between them – the book shows how the poet’s great questions are relevant to us and lie at the heart of our age. By dislocating the point of observation and making lightness and the ‘view from above’ a cognitive category, Leopardi reads the methodologies of what is still our modernity, with its myths and its obsessions; which include the forms of power, the comedy of social representation, the role of money and the remoteness of nature. While urging us not to take our eyes off the tragic, he emphasizes the necessity of the ‘poetic’ in a world that, unlike the poetry of the ancients and the world of children, fails to recognize the life that is in things, in nature and in bodies.
