SOURCE: Vivante, Arturo. “Introduction.” In Giacomo Leopardi Poems, pp. i-vii. Wellfleet, Mass.: Delphinium Press, 1988.

In the following excerpted introduction to his translation of Leopardi's poetry, Vivante summarizes the poet's life and method of composition.

There are books to have near, and Leopardi's Canti is assuredly one of them. XIXth-century Italian poetry would be immeasurably poorer without him. Besides the Canti, on which his fame mainly rests and which consists of thirty-six poems (in all about 200 pages,) his works include the Operette Morali, mostly in dialogue form; the Zibaldone, a voluminous diary-like collection or miscellany of observations; the Pensieri, or thoughts, which could be considered a distillation of the Zibaldone; an annotated edition of Petrarch's Rhymes (there are unmistakable echoes of Petrarch in some of his poems,) and the Paralipomeni, a satire in verse. His letters are also noteworthy.

He was born in 1798 in the small town of Recanati...