SOURCE: Perella, Nicolas James. “Leopardi and the Primacy of Desire.” In Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Giovanni Cecchetti, pp. 57-86. Los Angeles: Forum Italicum, 1990.

In the following essay, Perella deems Romantic desire and the philosophical longing for the infinite as central to Leopardi's poetry.

Un vértigo espantoso se apoderó de mi, y comencé a ver claro. El cementerio està dentro de Madrid. Madrid es el cementerio. Pero vasto cementerio, donde cada casa es el nicho de una familia; cade calle, el sepulcro de un acontecimiento; cada corazón, la urna cineraria de una esperanza o de un deseo.

[“Dìa de difuntos de 1826,” Mariano José de Larra (1809-1837)]

Let me begin by stating what can be safely taken as a truism: the origin of all imaginative creation lies in the consciousness of a lack, of an absence, and in the desire to supply or attain what is lacking...