SOURCE: Cook, Albert. “Leopardi: The Mastery of Diffusing Sorrow.” Canadian Journal of Italian Studies 4, Nos. 1-2 (1980): 68-82.

In the following essay, Cook details the mood, style, and thematic range of Leopardi's poetry.

I.

In the isolation of his father's library Leopardi set himself to the mastery of classical antiquity; other equally cloistered but less inspired minds, after the Industrial Revolution were similarly shown toward what will be called a miximizing retrieval of data backed by a faith in the set significance of one hallowed past. Behind and around this faith, something, that would negate it by engulfing it, was gathering head; this was a process of speculation and its accompanying expression characterized by the splendid control of a diffusing sorrow. Meanwhile it was Wolf and Cardinal Mai—the addressee of one of his first long poems (1.7-9)¹—rather than Winckelmann, to whom Leopardi gave his intellectural attention. Soon...