The Discourse, triggered by a review of Byron’s Giaour (there are a number of references to it in the early pages of the Zibaldone, but it was only published in full in 1906), was an impassioned, but closely reasoned, demonstration that feeling was no invention of the moderns in general, or the Romantics in particular, but was manifest in classical literature, indeed was all the stronger and more authentic inasmuch as those feelings were close to nature, still linked to humanity’s origins, while the “feeling” of the Romantics was an artificial construct. The moderns should therefore value that poetry above all, and try to approximate to it as much as possible, for poetry understood in this classical way was the last redoubt of nature in the modern, civilized, scientific world. The poetry of the ancients was in the fullest sense a poetry “of the heart,” unlike the sentimentalism of the Romantics, which was affected, narcissistic, and exhibitionist, the poetry of a heart worn on the sleeve. The Discorso stands out as a declaration of faith in poetry, a defense of poetry, to which, although his ideas will change radically over the years, Leopardi will remain loyal. It ended with a rousing call to Leopardi’s peers, his generation of “young Italians,” offering himself as a spokesman in defense of the national culture, an ambition that he would soon put into action with the publication in Rome (1819, but with the date “1818”) of the two poems that were to become famous, or, among conservatives, infamous, as the “patriotic poems,” All’Italia (“To Italy”) and Sopra il monumento di Dante che si preparava a Firenze (“On the Monument to Dante Being Erected in Florence”).

In June 1819 Leopardi officially came of age, although because of his precarious health the primogeniture had already been passed to Carlo. It was a time of reckoning, more severe even than the reckoning Leopardi had been making with himself for years, in his head and on paper. In July, Giacomo and Carlo planned an unlikely escape from home, involving falsely obtained passports and an intermediary who proved unreliable. With his past mastery in emotional blackmail, Monaldo put the passports in a drawer and told Giacomo he was free to take his whenever he wanted. The father’s disapproval, fueled by Giacomo’s unsuitable friendship, as Monaldo saw it, with the liberal Giordani (Giordani had stayed in Recanati in September 1818, and had not allayed Monaldo’s suspicions) and by unsuitable poems (never published), one on a dying woman, another on a woman murdered with her aborted child by her abuser with the assistance of a surgeon, not to mention the published political ones, now loomed over the household, and over Giacomo in particular. During these months the crisis was coming to a head for other reasons too, most important the young man’s rapidly deteriorating health, a condition of prolonged near-blindness, and the constant pain and discomfort caused by his worsening physical deformity: a hunchback had formed in his teens, accompanied by deterioration of the spine and a host of other maladies that may or may not have been related, brought upon himself, as Leopardi and his family believed, by excessive devotion to study. In the summer of 1819, the cruel ineluctability of his condition, the feelings of guilt that it aroused, the sense of isolation that the correspondence and friendship with Giordani had both assuaged and exacerbated, the failure of his work to receive the unstinting praise that he had hoped for and at some level expected, the retrospective horror of “seven years of mad and desperate study” of which he had written to Giordani in March 1818, the grim uncertainty about what the future might hold, all combined to plunge Leopardi into one of the blackest of the more or less extended episodes of melancholia from which he suffered throughout his life.

Introspection now became Leopardi’s dominant mode, tangibly so for the next five years. Continuing the prison model of his childhood, he did not leave Recanati, he barely left the house, apart from a long-awaited six-month stay in Rome, as the guest of his uncle Carlo Antici over the winter and early spring of 1822–23. It was an immensely productive period. Between 1819 and the end of 1823, at an accelerating pace from the second half of 1820 on, and with the exception of the visit to Rome, Leopardi patiently filled his notebook on an almost daily basis: four-fifths of the Zibaldone’s 4,526 pages would have been written by the time he began work on the Operette morali in January 1824. This is an introspectiveness that has the curious property of looking outward, or, to avoid the senseless paradox, it is the concentrated effort of a mind that looks to the outside to examine itself and examines itself in order to measure what is without. Concentrated, inward-looking, patiently accumulating.

But 1819 was also the year of the most beautiful and most original, certainly the most famous, of Leopardi’s lyric poems, L’infinito (“Infinity”). Unlike the lengthy canzoni he had written before and with which he hoped to make his name, L’infinito is a bare fifteen lines in length, tantalizingly almost a sonnet. In a single gesture, it encompasses memory and the present, the eternal and the passing, the cosmic and the proximate, the subject on the point of the sublime and the subject as submerged, sweetly “foundering.” Leopardi was conscious of a “total change” in his outlook and in himself, and what he had gone through in 1819 is memorably recalled in a famous passage in the notebook (Z 143–44), dated 1 July 1820, and incidentally the precise point at which the pace of writing in the Zibaldone begins to accelerate markedly. In this avowedly autobiographical entry, Leopardi speaks of his passing from a poetry of vivid imagination to a poetry of feeling, a feeling, in the modern way, that requires knowing, because feeling implies conceptualization and reflection. The fact that the distinction between “poet” and “philosopher” is not one of disciplinary specialism, but rather implies a different kind of poetry (and a different way of philosophizing), is amply demonstrated by the poetic output that accompanied the forty-odd months of prodigious reflection that filled the Zibaldone between 1820 and 1823, and again, in a different way, by its creative reworking in the course of 1824. In reality, Leopardi’s poetics evolved rapidly over the years between 1819 and 1823. With the so-called idilli (“idylls,” short lyrics that formally recall some versions of ancient Greek pastoral poetry), written between 1819 and 1821, Leopardi found space for a more personal poetry that could explore states of mind, feelings of loss, memory, sadness and melancholy, with a lightness of touch that he was to theorize as the essential propensity of modern poetry to express the “vague” and the “indefinite.” But in the meantime, the two “patriotic poems” were followed by further important experiments in the canzone genre. In general, the eight new canzoni written between 1820 and 1823 (and first published along with the 1818 poems in Bologna in 1824) preserved the aura of measured regularity that had characterized the two canzoni patriottiche. It was now used, however, to articulate a radical and evolving chain of thought; it had become manifestly a “thinking poetry.” To take but one example, “Bruto minore” (December 1821) staged the titanic rage of Brutus defeated by Mark Antony at the Battle of Philippi (Brutus’s monologue occupies almost the whole poem) against the emptiness of the concept of “virtue” and against the putridi nepoti (“corrupt descendants”) who are destined to follow him. The hollowing-out of virtue, in a bleak and barren landscape, is a substantial devaluation of the natural illusions that Leopardi had seen as so vital and beneficial to the world of antiquity in its proximity to nature. The poem is a high point in a kind of battle that runs through the canzoni written from 1820 to 1822, between the desire to hold on to those illusions and the struggle to find ways of reinventing them in modern poetry.

Both Brutus and Sappho (the protagonist of another great masterpiece of these years, “Sappho’s Last Song,” May 1822), heroes (or antiheroes) of disillusionment, are figures from classical antiquity, and in allowing the rot of civilization to reach these hallowed creatures, Leopardi was signaling the radicalization of his reflection on existence. The progression of this mode of thought can be traced in the pages of the Zibaldone in the period of its most intensive composition, between 1821 and 1823. What Leopardi was now realizing was that there had never been a period in human history when nature was maternally benign and human beings had lived in harmony with it: nature was fundamentally hostile, or at best indifferent. The question that was left open, the tension traced in the canzoni, was whether, even so, all semblance of illusion, ideals, fiction should be abandoned in favor of “the truth,” or whether some remnant of it might still be held on to, particularly in the form of poetry.

The composition in September 1823 of the exquisite Alla sua donna (“To His Lady”) notwithstanding, the possibility of poetry, in the way that he had written it up to now, seemed all but exhausted. Instead, Leopardi turned in 1824 to a project he had long nurtured, the writing of satirical dialogues formally inspired by the model of Lucian and other fantastical prose pieces which would become the twenty Operette morali (“Moral Tales”) written during that year.