SOURCE: Chomel, Luisetta Elia. “Extratemporality in Leopardi's Major Idylls: ‘La rimembranza’ and ‘Le temps retrouvé’.” Italica 63, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 161-70.

In the following essay, Chomel discusses Leopardi's philosophical reflections on time as depicted in his poetry of 1828 to 1829.

Man's desire for an infinite, eternal happiness, in contrast with the finite temporal limits of existence, is the fundamental theme of Leopardi's lyrics. As Bruno Biral has noted, long before he started his philosophical reflections, Leopardi felt the horror of the inexorable passing of time in its existential impact.¹ From this perspective, I Canti, in their various and apparently contradictory approaches to the notion of time, represent the poet's lifelong struggle to overcome the initial horror of disintegration, the “mai più” inherent in human mortality. The poetics that inform the subsequent phases of Leopardi's production are strictly related to the different conceptions of time the poet embraced before finally accepting the...