SOURCE: Alcorn, John and Dario Del Puppo. “Leopardi's Historical Poetics in the Canzone ‘Ad Angelo Mai’.” Italica 72, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 21-39.

In the following essay, Alcorn and Del Puppo study Leopardi's representation of the historical imagination in the poem “Ad Angelo Mai,” citing affinities with Friedrich Nietzsche's view of history and noting the poet's observation that “history at once affirms reason and reveals reason's limits.”

The canzone, “Ad Angelo Mai quand'ebbe trovato i libri di Cicerone della Repubblica” (1820),¹ raises interesting questions about poetry as a medium for representing history. Though likened to a philosophy of history by Francesco De Sanctis,² it is perhaps best analyzed as an expression of what we shall call Leopardi's historical poetics, a central element of which is the representation of an idiosyncratic canon of glorious figures in Italian history. In this paper we wish to elucidate Leopardi's historical poetics and make sense of his...