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The Library of the World’s Best Literature. An Anthology in Thirty Volumes. 1917.
Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837)
Leopardi, Giacomo, Count (lā-ō-par’dē). A celebrated Italian poet; born at Recanati in Tuscany, June 29, 1798; died at Naples, June 14, 1837. His family, though noble, was poor, and he acquired a knowledge of the classics and of literature almost unaided in his father’s library. Before he was eighteen he had produced a Latin translation (with commentary) of Porphyrius’s ‘Life of Plotinus’; a treatise on ‘Some Roman Rhetoricians’ of the second century, and a ‘History of Astronomy,’ both in Latin; and an ‘Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients,’ in Italian, citing over 400 authors. His subsequent works were: ‘Ode to Italy’ (1818); ‘Ode on the Monument to Dante’ (1819); ‘Ode to Cardinal Mai on the Discovery of Cicero’s Tractate on The State’ (1820); ‘Brutus the Younger’ (1823), an ode, and ‘Comparison of the Sentiments of Brutus the Younger, and of Theophrastus, when in the Face of Death,’ in which two works his pessimistic views first had formal expression; ‘Verses,’ a collection of his miscellaneous poems (1826); ‘Moral Opuscules’ (1827), mostly observations, in dialogue form, on ethical questions. ‘The Broom-Flower,’ ‘Sylvia,’ and ‘The Night Song,’ are his most celebrated poems. He left unpublished at his death a volume of ‘Thoughts.’ (See Critical and Biographical Introduction).