This year holds the promise of continuing greatness. Our publication calendar includes books by Sally Delehant, Chuck Stebelton, Shannon Tharp, and Peter O’Leary; to say nothing of the work that I’ll be receiving and posting in the months to come.

So dig in: poems from Topher Hemann, Eric Hoffman, Mary-Catherine Jones, Joseph Massey, Peter O’Leary, Paige Taggart, Brian Teare, Shannon Tharp; prose from Michael Autrey, Eric Hoffman, and Peter O’Leary. Picks come courtesy of yours truly.

Shouistness: (version); EL/JP!; JCNY; PBNY; Cody; O’D.s; Princes; Magpies; z./S./J.; Neo-Modernists; NJNY; D./D.T.B.; LaChima; EMS; & you.

flowing
monuments

each one
degenerates

approaches
apeirogon

[ . ]

Inchoate work / the oven on, clicks / document the memory
of beginning / burst of bulb, flowers / vermillion / the jaw
the slew the scapula the spine trail of body / an obedient
vessel weeding the rain, like pennies for all Paulines. / Jesus
gracious cut it out I can’t keep up absurd you speak to me / a sayer
a doer a complicit imposter / a good new picture / seeds / doubt.

– – –

Circling the immigrant’s breviary, a red-tailed hawk files it under ‘noon’,
necessary / reminds the M. that who lives, / laces the sea with thine own
canto / that who seeks to at once flee himself / elevates herself. / A
balloon catching wind / the quotidian as windows / on romance / on
defeat.

| | |

1619, first cargo on the swollen St. James. Bill T. asks Who wants to talk
about slavery? Really who? A little lace / some handsome / and I wanna big
delay / a meadow-drown overdose / a confluence of child, thickets, and high-
cal suppose. Will / I end with the going or the in it / the work or the mounted
moon? / Will we, the excuses we make, the stanzas we hew / cradle— . / Revise
the birch for its aspirin.

differences in landscape

friction in the hiss
raises forests
and lays flat the field

to the ear’s extent –

            •

a puddle in the dark
impossible to miss
because of pissing rain

            •

a sound like
white noise rustle

or friction in the snow screen

drapes over the poem
almost in its form

            •

that pop song with
the submarine ping:

bar dudes sound
the dance floor

with eyes for
and for not

            •

just as a chandelier’s scatter
of twinkling in cathedral acoustics
echoes the higher dimensions

a Homeric simile conforms
to a mind’s raised contours

            •

from the stadium’s roar
thru the third base gate

emerges the sense
the other side will clearly win

            •

where the field ends
the chatter of crickets

peepers mark the water line

            •

let cicadas rattle
the mind cherry
trees harbor winter

in August boughs
a screen of natural static

            •

As snow puts to bed
differences in the landscape
what she says quiets

whatever you’d say
makes us unique

Distant shit
and wet moss

laced through
what winter’s

left: radiated

rain, warped
window sill,

wind-seething
eucalyptus.


ii.

Ocean-shoved
cumulus cloud

incises horizon

held by hills
and radio towers’

red volleyed lights.


iii.

As if to pin
a thought

to the back
of my skull

    a humming-
bird pivots,
glares

through me
— its red-

metallic
throat a-

float
in fog.


iv.

From all corners here

stars confuse the dark.
Compound the dark.

Frog-chants in tandem

over a seasonal creek’s
flat, static whisk.

Gustaf Sobin. Collected Poems, edited by Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Edward Foster. Talisman House, 2010.

A poet of spectacular deliberateness, Gustaf Sobin transformed the ode into language captured in time-lapse. Reading this carefully assembled Collected Poems, published in 2010 by Talisman House, we come into contact with a mind capable of totally focused attention in which poetic speech unfurls like the fiddlehead of a fern in sunlight. Slowness is a principle expression of beauty in Sobin: “Surrounded today in self-image, we readily forget how slowly we came to represent our own features, to give some kind of graphic form to our own physical presence” (Luminous Debris, 70). That’s Sobin writing about the emergence of representations of the human form in archaic cave paintings in southern France; he could just as easily be writing about poetic form. Surrounded today as we are by the equivalency of self-image with poetic form, we’ve forgotten the elegance formal revelation can bring to the poem, one consonant with a human ergonomics of the poem – the body’s way of voicing language – and with the natural world. As he writes in “The Earth as Air,” a poem he calls “An Ars Poetica”:

            in twos, that
it ribbon    forth,    the
                                    forked idiom’s….

            each thing
eithered to    another, the    this
whatevered to the
                                that, the

            ark-

            within-the-
            lyre-    propellant:    wind
                and white roses

            wrapt in a    taut, vibratory weave. (CP 236)

Sobin started late, publishing his first book of poetry, Wind Chrysalid’s Rattle, in 1980 with the Montemora Foundation. He was forty-four years old. From that point, he produced work steadily: another book with Montemora, Celebration of the Sound Through, three books with New Directions through the eighties and nineties, and then three books with Talisman House, until his death in 2005. Strains run through the entire body of work, interesting and frequently pleasing to register in this Collected Poems: fixations on certain words, a generative facility with the ode and corresponding modes of praise, an essential minimalism stylistically matched with lavish attention to the natural world, a generally philosophical, specifically phenomenological concern with the qualities of becoming and being that define the human life, and an unusual attention to the process in language and thought of obliteration and negation, something Andrew Joron and Andrew Zawacki, in their lucid introduction to the volume, label in Sobin’s poems “transcriptions of the isn’t—a recurrent word, in his usage, suspended between verb and noun, and caught in the act of contracting against its own negation” (CP 2). But Sobin’s isn’t a poetry of doubt; rather, it’s an exploration of natural and intellectual growth and decay, conducted in repeated affirmations of the sensual realities he observes so meticulously.

There’s a remarkable consistency to Sobin’s poetry from the start of this huge volume to its finish. Poems written in his last years reverberate with elements summoned initially in his earliest poems. His vocabulary is fixated on a cluster of words; in fact, cluster is one of them. Others: Bunched. Blanched. Flaked. Vocable. Word. World. Speech. Wind. Breath. Volute. Air. Earth. Flame. Wave. Rock. Field. Iris. Neither. Nor. While this list doesn’t exhaust the words on which he fixes his work, they describe Sobin’s minimalism, which has an unusual lushness because it so often works in the realm of the natural world: painstaking descriptions of process, of light moving from one place to another, of a flower opening, of a snail moving across a wall.

    wild buds on    their wind-
            ballasted antlers, beasts    struck,
its love belling dumbly in the rain-
                        darkened rose. (CP 174)

As I read through Collected Poems, I began to think of Sobin’s poems – nearly all of which are odes – as analogies to Agnes Martin’s paintings. Just as Martin would make repeated, inexhaustible use of a grid on a pale or creamy background, so Sobin would reach for his velvet bag of words and roll them like dice to combine and recombine his language and images into new poems. Personally, I find this process intoxicating to witness. Compare these two selections, the first from a poem entitled “And Thus Unto” from The Earth as Air, the second from “The Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables,” from Voyaging Portraits (both of which books were published by New Directions in the 1980s):

worlds un-
ravel
worlds, the

wrought heavens: our blanched
reflectives.
would
leave, who’d

perched, already, a tribe-in-
flight, at the
breath’s

flaked
edges (CP 171-2)

~

that air not
end, nor
flame
gutter.        that earth not coil    —ingested —
into those nounal
hoards, but
verb-

herded, be
given:    offered forth.    wind unto
wind, foam
unto foam, be pitched, sonorous; through each
meted particle, trans-
mitted. (CP 326)

Joron and Zawacki refer to Sobin’s peculiar prosody as “vertical tracking,” following Sobin’s own description of his process, pointing to its “impetus to spill, in thrall to gravity’s pull” (CP 5). The first quotation above captures for me one of the keenest pleasures of reading Sobin: the poem works like a heliotropic vine trained to a post – as we move our eyes downward through the poem, the poem moves upward into the air to arrive at a surprise, here “breath’s flaked edges.” Though hard to know exactly what this means, it feels like a release from the lines that lead us to this moment, suggesting decay as much as freedom. The second quotation works similar terrain, shifting the eye from earth to air, from wind to heaven. Here, the slightly longer lines densify Sobin’s music, ingraining the words with sound and rhyme. (The visual/sonic pairing of “meted” and “-mitted” is particularly illustrative of Sobin’s slow-cured skills.)

Sobin, working privately and obscurely in Provence, where he moved as a young man to stay for the rest of his life, removed from the American scene but belonging not merely to its peripheries as one of its dedicated language cultivators, beholden to the work of a cluster of masters, many of whom he names in “Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables” (they include Blake, René Char, Sappho, Pindar, Anacreon, Catullus, Isaiah, Parmenides, Dante, Ibn Arabi, Tang dynasty poets, Mallarmé (“that / rush // of crushed / shadow”), Shakespeare, Traherne, Hopkins, Wordsworth, Williams, Duncan, Oppen, and the linguists Whorf and Sapir), growing his poems and ideas from a handful of seeds, was an archetypal Orphic poet. In this sense, his poetry belongs, among his near contemporaries, with Robert Duncan’s and Ronald Johnson’s, the former to whom Sobin dedicated work, the latter to whom he appears never to have made reference. (They were born the same year.) Among older poets in the tradition, besides those he names in his autobiographical poem, you’d also want to include Rilke, Shelley, Emerson, and Goethe. Elizabeth Sewell begins her treatment of poetry and natural history, The Orphic Voice, with this provocation: “Poetry is a form of power. It fell to early thought to make that power visible and human, and the story of Orpheus is that vision and that mortality” (Orphic Voice 3). She insists that the Orpheus myth permits humankind to frame an essential question: What power and place has poetry in the living universe? Answers to Sewell’s question are everywhere sought out in Sobin’s poetry. What makes his questing for these answers distinctive is Sobin’s sense that power, such as it exhibits itself in poetry, is perceived organismically, like growth, rather than as epiphany or revelation. As a flower opening its buds. From “Irises”:

    way that they ruffle    in
that rock    windcell (that their buds    un-
                        scroll and open: opened,

    asking myself only for what I see….). (CP 214)

There are four kinds of Orphic poet, each distinguished by a stage of Orpheus’ life. First, there’s the poet who subdues the natural world in the singing of poems. There’s the poet of unbridled eros and loss, singing his love for Eurydice. There’s the poet who journeys to the underworld, where secrets are revealed. And, finally, there’s the poet sacrificed to death but resurrected to prophesy to the end of time. Ronald Johnson was an Orphic poet of the first, third, and fourth kinds; Sobin was an Orphic poet of the first and second kinds. Robert Duncan’s Orphism embraced all four kinds. So did Rilke’s. No matter which kind, the Orphic poet finds power in song and vision, language and mind:

            what brought me, then,

over the low

ledges.    brought that I
bring: impelled that I urge, herd, drive the
words    into
that

luminous salvage.    and stand, there, in those
linked shadows, thus
lit. (CP 331)

Characteristics, always there to see and hear in the individual books become amplified in Collected Poems, defining a style. Sobin’s principle prosodic technique is enjambment, a brokenness practiced to the point of cutting words in half. Similarly, he avoids typical orthography, rarely capitalizing, punctuating eccentrically, and making use of frequent caesurae. He avails four “forms” in these poems, a word I use with caution only because to say form (or four) suggests an easily recognized distinction that just isn’t here. Nevertheless, Sobin writes in an attenuated verse paragraph with fairly long lines, as in the selection from “Irises” above, these paragraphs usually linked in sections (often separated by lines across the page); he writes in long strings of heavily enjambed, short-lined poetry, often serially, as in the selection from “And Thus Unto” above; and he writes in a hybrid of these two forms, moving in and out of longer lines into more atomic, tensely positioned short lines, as in the selections from “A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables.” These three forms pervade throughout his writing. The fourth form is the most unusual in his work: it’s an oracular, axiomatic, horizontal line of proverb/poetry, typically center justified. In his earlier work, this line tends more toward proverb and can, at times, sound like Kahlil Gibran: “Deep down, the kisses dream.” Or: “The lover is the beauty of the beloved.” Fortunately for his work, Sobin subverted his instinct for aphorism into poetry. Beginning in the late 1970s, he began to collect scraps and unused fragments from his poetry into a running annual list he called “Transparent Itineraries.” In these, Sobin explored a lateral adding of sense and meaning to complement the vertical tracking of his other poems. The last set of these, from 2002/3, demonstrates the gnomic freedom this form permitted him. Less cast-offs of thought, these phrases suggest the poetics that made his poems grow:

For me, the apex of Sobin’s achievement is the period enclosing the three books he published with New Directions: The Earth as Air (1982), Voyaging Portraits (1986), and Breaths’ Burials (1994). These are books of a grand accomplishment, in particular Voyaging Portraits, which includes at its core the poem from which I’ve quoted most in this review, “A Portrait of the Self as Instrument of Its Syllables,” Sobin’s finest poem by my estimation, a serial, autobiographical poem that deserves to be studied alongside Bunting’s “Briggflatts,” Johnson’s Book of the Green Man, and parts of Zukofsky’s “A” (“A”-12 in particular).

Where the earlier work suggests at times apprenticeship, Sobin’s later work reveals repeated concern with the archaic realities that captured his attention, in prose as well in poetry. (Sobin’s study of antiquity in Provence and Languedoc, Luminous Debris, is a masterpiece of observational thinking.) One of the best of his later sequences, “Late Bronze, Early Iron: a Journey Book,” written in his aphoristic form, is as much an essay as poem. (Another later poem, “Reading Sarcophagi,” is actually subtitled “An Essay,” and includes footnotes.) In his late work, Sobin seems mainly to have extended the poetic discoveries made during the eighties and early nineties; his concern seems to have been more new growth than new varieties. But he enriches in this work his study of the possibilities of the ode, which he uses as a vessel for his lapidary reflections and questions, themselves a kind of praise – of language and mind. Consider the beginning of “Prelude IV” from The Places as Preludes, from 2005, Sobin’s last complete book of poetry:

… went on resonating, the
myriad fragments of
that dec-
imated mirror.    wasn’t it that that you heard, now,
rather than

saw? yes, heard: heard the
gaze and the gracious vault of the brows as, ob-

edient to
number, the limbs, as
if accorded, entered, now, the full scales of that

singular fugue. (CP 661)

So much of the poetry I most value was or is published by small presses, or, after the poet is apotheosized, by university presses that collect the work in legacy editions. Anymore, with funding uncertainties and editorial confusion, university presses aren’t reliable to pick up overlooked work and preserve it for the future in decently edited editions. Sobin’s work might easily have fallen into benign negligence if it weren’t for the dedication of the editors of this volume or for the commitment of the publisher to keep Sobin’s work in print. Hats off, then, to Esther Sobin, Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, and Edward Foster, and to Talisman House, for publishing one of the genuinely great books of recent years.

Coils in a silo in cavernous open space downward sloping
lined with aluminum panels crosshatched with grids; a hum.
A droning range. Tuned to the key of E. And a glare of light.
Intensifying a holy living form in the nave of the silo.
No secret for the poet-priests. What is it? Wondrous. Wall
of light: like the enormous gills of a salamander. Like a reef.
Like a colossal bone-white fungus with a feathered flesh.
Like the central nervous system of some vast exposure the light
nurses from loam and shadow. Metamorphoses of gloom.
Phase-shifting flanging of sound. A woven texture reticulated.
It is forty arborescent feet tall with three polyporous
conch-like shelves. Stained with bioluminescent signatures.
Sutures of daylight. And a central spinal stalk vivid in the form.
There’s a cord with bulbous contours out from which the life
of the animal emerges.
                                                Seeing it. Consumed with knowledge of it
incoherent unconfirmed. Terrified. But I recognize this creature.
I am its expert. I walk on one of its tremoring shelves tilting
to move toward the column to touch it. What stirs?

Shadow’s fruits are forms to shape out from the quarreling earth
the mind’s devoured worth, soil’s mash of relation
flexing hyphal threads repulsing with awareness enmesh.

Whether one prefers Longfellow’s version of the Inferno, or Ciaran Carson’s, one knows Dante’s name, as one knows the names Baudelaire and Goethe. Introducing his Leopardi: Selected Poems, Eamon Grennan is blunt: “mention the name Leopardi to ten educated people (poets included) in Ireland, England, America or elsewhere in the English-speaking world, and it is likely that nine of them will shrug, knowing little or nothing about him or his poetry.” Juxtapose our ignorance with Jonathan Galassi’s extravagant claim in his introduction to his complete version of the Canti, “Among the canti [sic] are the first truly modern lyrics, the wellspring of everything that follows in the European poetic tradition,” we respond with a question, Where have you been, Leopardi, all our reading lives?

Giacomo Leopardi was not a nobody. Schopenhauer admired him and lamented not meeting him. Nietzsche called him one of the four finest prose stylists of the 19th century. (For those wondering about Nietzsche’s taste, Emerson, Landor and Merimeé complete the quartet.) In his 1881 essay on Byron Matthew Arnold seems to prefer Leopardi. Selections from Leopardi’s Canti appeared in English in 1923, 1943, 1953, 1966, 1981, and 1997. Three “translations” appeared in Lowell’s volume Imitations. Pound offered one in his 1911 Canzoni. They dropped like pins. There is reason to believe that Galassi’s Leopardi will make a noise.

Galassi’s Leopardi has several advantages over recent selections, even Grennan’s notable 1997 selection. Though Grennan’s book garnered praise and won prizes, and some of his versions of Leopardi’s canonical poems are superior to Galassi’s – for instance his “To Himself” –, Grennan’s Leopardi sounds less like a progenitor than a follower, already the poet who has absorbed the lessons he allegedly taught to his successors. Dip into Galassi’s complete version; immediately one remarks how peculiarly un-Modern Leopardi sounds.

Leopardi was a distinguished classicist. A furious autodidact, he took over his own tuition at 12. Along with Greek and Latin he knew Spanish, French, German, English and, as another Leopardi scholar alleges, “enough Hebrew as a teenager to debate with learned Jews in Ancona.” Study Galassi’s detailed chronology. Leopardi was a prodigy of poetry and of learning. He wrote all the significant Canti in about ten years, churning out work in a variety of genres the while, and died, just 39, in Naples. His principal work, “the enormous notebook of ideas and impressions, the Zibaldone,” was written between 1817-1832, and runs over 4,500 pages. (Leopardi indexed the work himself.)

Reading Galassi’s Leopardi from cover-to-cover one agrees with Plumly’s delicate observation from Posthumous Keats: “[Keats] understood that there are no mistakes in art, only failures.” Even in those rare instances when circumstances have bequeathed us an oeuvre in pieces – a few complete examples, a garland of excerpts – poets who deserve the overused epithet great are not uniformly so. Not every poem padding later editions of Leaves of Grass succeeds. Among Emily Dickinson’s seventeen hundred odd poems a few hundred secure her reputation. What distinguishes the great for those who in a few generations undergo the rigorous editing of the anthologist, the Ph.D. candidate’s dissection, the unabashed fan’s blinding attention, is that even their failures are worth attending to. Leopardi’s are.

Why have the Canti never caught on in English? Several reasons. Their length: thirty-six poems run to three hundred and twelve pages. Galassi includes five “fragments” and four “other texts”, adding thereby another fifty to a book bulging with 135 pages of notes, bibliography, acknowledgements and index. (This is the scholarly model Galassi pioneered with his translation of three volumes of another poet essential to the Italian and Modernist canon, Eugenio Montale.) Subtract the welcome en face Italian and the reader still confronts 156 pages of primary matter. Almost defeating our common-sense definition of lyric poetry, just four of his poems are a single page in length. Some run 200 lines or more. Their tone: As Ottavio Mark Casale puts it in his valuable introduction to his 1981 selection from Leopardi’s works, “we often get the sense in Leopardi’s late works of being in the presence of an ancient tragic Greek or Hebrew come again to speak in modern yet timeless terms.” Their style: one hears the truism that poetry is untranslatable repeated about Leopardi. One hears of the “sublime poverty” of his style. The reader discovers that Leopardi is didactic; often the tone changes drastically from stanza to stanza. This tendency is magnified in translation. The polyphonic effect that form and rhyme serve to unify is diminished; the voices break and waver; and are broken by infelicities. And finally there is Leopardi’s apparent pessimism: Take Byron’s dystopian “Darkness,” subtract the fiends and demons, and one has an inkling of Leopardi’s magnificent lack of consolation. Where Byron sets the war of all against all in a volcano, Leopardi sits on the slopes of Vesuvius, the fresh air perfumed by sulfur, and sees the same unforgiving world.

This last is the block critics and readers can’t move from his tomb: Leopardi’s apparent nihilism. It prompted Arnold to qualify his endorsement, and contemporaries to deride him. Stinging words attributed to Manzoni or Tommaseo—the former then the most famous Italian writer of the period, the latter a scholar Leopardi demolished: “There is no God because I am a hunchback, I am hunchback because there is no God.” Indeed he was. Leopardi suffered severe scoliosis, debilitating eye problems, dropsy; he loved and his love was not returned; his mother was remote, tyrannical; his father profligate and conservative; he hated his small town; it has been alleged that he did not leave his family’s large house unaccompanied until his twentieth year. Was he doomed to write like this?

Everything is evil. I mean, everything that is, is wicked; every existing thing is evil; everything exists for a wicked end. Existence is wickedness and is ordained for wickedness. Evil is the end, the final purpose, of the universe. Order, the state, laws, the natural processes of the universe are all quite simply evil and are directed exclusively toward evil. The only good is nonbeing; the only really good thing is the thing that is not, things that are not things; all things are bad. All that exists, the totality of the many worlds that exist, the universe, are nothing but a minor blemish, a mote in metaphysics. Existence, in its general nature and essence, is an imperfection, an irregularity, a monstrosity. But this imperfection is a very small thing, truly just a blemish, because all existing worlds, however numerous or grand they may be, though not for certain infinite in number or size, are consequently infinitely small compared to what the universe could be, if it were infinite. And all that exists is infinitely small compared as it were to the true infinity of nonexistence, of nothingness.

A person promulgating such views today invites scrutiny. If not allowed to consult in person, psychiatrists and biographers would diagnose from a distance. Law enforcement might be notified. At minimum, medication would be recommended. Deeply unfashionable then, such views now arouse suspicion.

Many offer this excerpt without comment, as exhibit A in the case against Leopardi. I am grateful to W.S. Di Piero for filling in the picture. In his introduction to his 1981 translation of Leopardi’s book of social criticism Pensieri, he adds:

But we learn immediately thereafter that [Leopardi] poses all this as one more risky, unfashionable, unlikable possibility: ‘This system, though it offends our ideas, which hold that the end of all things can only be goodness, may perhaps be more tenable than Leibnitz’s [sic] formulation, or Pope’s, that “everything is good.” I’m not anxious, however, to extend my system so far as to say that the existing universe is the worst of all possible universes, thus replacing optimism with pessimism. Who can ever know the limits of possibility?’” [Italics added, to distinguish Leopardi’s words from Di Piero’s.]

Without its conclusion, this spectacular pessimistic outburst from the Zibaldone is misleading. Few include it because one feels certain, reading this oft-quoted excerpt, that we know who Leopardi is and what he means: he is angry; he is a proto-Camus, a nihilist. Add the concluding section and one realizes that Leopardi is conducting a thought experiment not unlike Einstein’s famous ‘passenger on the train’: An observer on the train leaving the station can’t be sure if the train or the station moves. Leopardi, observing the world, can’t be sure it is good so he essays the opposite, finally admitting neither essay is definitive: the essence of the possible is that it is limitless.

2

Leopardi could be the test case for the merits, and the limits, of biographical criticism. Knowing of Leopardi’s personal difficulties—physical, psychological, his contemporaries would add spiritual—one assumes his work reflects them. It seems impossible not to see Leopardi’s pessimism as the product of his personal suffering. Launched against his work during his lifetime, Leopardi took offense to this line of attack. He resisted it, but resistance was futile. His work is not better or worse for his view of the world, and to think so is to endorse an increasingly popular form of positivist criticism: to be great, poetry must espouse good news.

Against the misguided attacks of Nobel laureates Seamus Heaney and Czeslaw Milosz, Denis Donoghue’s defense of Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” in Adam’s Curse is instructive. I quote at length because Donoghue’s remarks are worth volumes of pseudo-psychologizing:

Heaney and Milosz are emotivists: . . . they assert their merely personal preferences while trying to present them as objective and impersonal. They have no criteria to which they may appeal. In default of such criteria, they resort to merely assertive gestures, employing words with which debate on the relevant issues is futile. “Life” as they use the word is a mere counter, designed to fend off every call for clarification. Supposedly we know what it means and concur in the implied claim that no specification of its kind is required. There is no sense of the difference between one life and another, or of the contradictions operative within any one life. Indeed, Larkin’s “Aubade” should be cited again to make the point that in an implied scene of life and death it avoids the slogans that Milosz and Heaney so easily resort to. “Aubade” imagines the middle passage, doing without slogans while doing the best it can.

Leopardi is a victim of this emotivist fallacy. Arnold, ultimately tilting back towards Byron after flirting with Leopardi—his assertive term is “character”—practices a version of it. As Gerald Dawe, reviewing Geoffrey Hill in “The Irish Times” writes, “poetry [is] moving ever closer to an instantaneous responsiveness and emotional availability, an interior decoration equal in value to other forms of expression and adornment.” The habit of identifying poet and speaker has become so ingrained that we forget that when reading a poem we are regarding an object, not judging the content of personal communication. Heaney plays fast and loose with this distinction in his critique of “Aubade.” Milosz takes it a step further, launching an ad hominem attack when he publishes “Against Philip Larkin.” Of course there is equal danger in severing the delicate but essential connection between creator and text, mourning the death of the author while admiring our mourning finery in the mirror.

If one is to crown Leopardi as the first modernist, as so many in all camps seem eager to, one has to set forth what one means by Modernism. We drag the past with a seine, catching this figure while leaving that one to wait for a more inclusive movement. It is safe to say Leopardi is a limb of the body of work it is impossible to imagine the body of Italian literature without. Petrarch, Dante, Leopardi and Montale are the poets who forged and purified the language of their tribe. Leopardi’s early poems were important to the Risorgimento, the Italian nationalist movement. Leopardi’s later poems, with their deeply personal voice, their “I,” are his alleged gift to modern poetry. In poems Galassi translates as “Infinity,” “To the Moon,” “To Himself” even “The Reawakening” we hear Leopardi’s “I” as if he were our contemporary. But we are mistaken; he is not. Persona is not personality.

Sadly, Leopardi’s ‘modernism’ may be no more than this: that he is one of the first we know enough about to subject him to the emotivist fallacy. Defenders of Leopardi indulge in it too, rationalizing or excusing his pessimism—Casale goes so far as to report on Leopardi’s “incredibly beautiful smile”, as if a tendency to frown might further damage his reputation. Leopardi doesn’t need apologists; he can survive spirited attacks. We don’t have to like his views, but to marginalize or dismiss him outright is to dismiss a great part of ourselves.

Like Nietzsche, Leopardi “turn[ed] his head away” from consoling ideas that might merit capitalization, God first and foremost. As the Pensieri are a study of the limitless mendacity of society, the Canti dwell on the corruption of meaning and value, and on their necessity even in corrupt and diminished form. The first poem in the collection concerns itself with “Italian” national identity. In Leopardi’s time there was no Italy, as we know it; lamenting “Italy” Leopardi laments Hellenistic Rome. Galassi translates line twenty-four of “To Italy” as “You were a lady, and now you are a slave.” It might be the most succinct statement of the book’s themes. A paraphrase of Leopardi’s statement might read, ‘you were a symbol, and now you are an object.’ A symbol is full of meaning; an object is a mere commodity. Even in Leopardi’s insipid melodrama “Consalvo” he develops the theme of decline from the symbolic to the materialistic: “And so excessive love / had made him into a slave and a child.” Even love, in excess, is dangerous and reductive.

3

Consider Galassi’s version of this long passage from “Broom, or the Flower of the Desert.” Speaking of the Italian original Arnold appears to be speaking of this passage, which he says is superior to anything in Byron. (Galassi’s en face Italian does not include the first line Arnold refers to—it does include the last— and this review is not the place to sort variations among editions.)

Often I sit at night on these deserted
slopes which the hardened flood
clothes in black that seems to undulate,
and over the sad plain
I see the stars
burning above the purest blue,
which the sea reflects in the far distance
and, twinkling everywhere, the world
glistens in the empty sky.
And once my eyes have focused on those lights,
which seem a tiny point to them,
though they’re enormous, so that next to these
the earth and sea
are in truth no greater than a speck
to which not only man
but this globe where man is nothing
is totally unknown; and when I see
these still more infinitely distant
nuclei, it seems, of stars
that look like haze to us, to which
not only man and earth but all our stars
together, infinite in size and number,
the golden sun among them,
are unfamiliar or else they appear
the way these look to earth: a point
of nebulous light—
how do I think of you then, sons of men?
And considering
the way you are down here,
to which the earth I walk upon bears witness,
and that even so you see yourself
as lord and end assigned to Everything,
and how you were often flattered to relate
that the authors of the universe
came down to this mere grain of sand called earth
for love of you, and often condescended
to speak with you and yours,
and how you keep retailing absurd notions
insulting to the wise, down to our day,
which seemingly surpasses every other
in knowledge and civility; what emotion, then
mortal unhappy race, what notion of you
finally assails my heart? It’s hard to say
whether it’s laughter or pity that prevails.

Galassi’s archaism “to speak to you and yours” allows one to entertain the possibility that Leopardi condescends to his audience. Unless we identify searching pity with the Hebrews, one can’t agree with Casale that Leopardi’s tone is ancient. Galassi’s translation may be complicit in ‘modernizing’ Leopardi, but this is inevitable; Leopardi would be the first to acknowledge, and the first to lament, this inevitability. (It is also desirable—we need Leopardi, in whatever form we can get him.) In “Broom” and elsewhere in the Canti, Leopardi adopts the perspective of a telescope, looking deeper into space, and finding there fewer and fewer reasons even to hope much less believe in God or human eminence.

Leopardi sounds the first note that even the animals know by 1923, when Rilke restates it in the first “Duino Elegy”: “and already the knowing animals are aware / that we are not really at home in / our interpreted world.” Rilke’s “interpreted world” is akin to Leopardi’s world of infinite possibility. The ‘interpretations’ Rilke speaks of are the ‘limits’ Leopardi knows are false, and in the next breath admits they are essential. We are not at home in the actual world, nor in the world of interpretations. There is no tradition to receive. A more extreme statement of the same predicament: “Nothing is granted to me,” Kafka writes to Milena, “everything has to be earned, not only the present and the future, but the past too.”

Take “Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd in Asia,” a poem many consider Leopardi’s finest. A shepherd addresses the moon as it rises, comparing his own wanderings to the moon’s wanderings in the sky, and a beautiful parallel of structure and experience develops: “Aren’t you tired / of plying the eternal byways?” The shepherd asks the moon, and the moon’s silence allows the shepherd freedom to ask and answer, talking to himself as only the mad, or madly lonely, do. It is hard not to see the poem in light of Psalm 23, “the Lord is thy shepherd,” or this passage from the Gospel of Matthew: “when [Christ] saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion on them, because they were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd.” The shepherd speculates that the moon has knowledge, as the Lord allegedly has, but the moon remains silent, and the shepherd merely hopes, he is certain that he does not know, that life has a purpose.

I ask myself:
Why all these lights?
What does the endless air do, and that deep
eternal blue? What is the meaning of
this huge solitude? And what am I?
I ask myself: about this boundless,
wondrous space
and its numberless inhabitants,
and all these works and all this movement
of all heavenly and earthly things,
revolving without rest,
only to return to where they started;
any purpose, any usefulness
I cannot see. But you, immortal maiden,
surely understand it all.
This I know and feel:
that from the eternal motions,
from my fragile being,
others may derive
some good or gladness; life for me is wrong.

The last clause sounds a false note. In attempting to preserve Leopardi’s tone Galassi injures sense. (If someone says, “life for me is wrong” we move to correct, gently.) We might accept “life for me is pain” or “life is suffering,” even “life is bad,” though the former would introduce a misleading off rhyme with “maiden.” Elsewhere, in a bid to preserve rhythm Galassi introduces otiose words. But to second guess this translation is to disarticulate the bones of an intact skeleton.

The “Night song” is the renovation and resurrection of a symbol. The moon is the shepherd’s interlocutor and companion. As if under the pressure of the shepherd’s attention one wants to ask, is it the moon or the shepherd that changes? We know the moon is a sphere, and know it only appears flat — but does the shepherd, who has only ever ‘seen’ it? We know the moon is a sphere even as we only see one side, but we read Leopardi as the shepherd views the moon, as a disc. When we conflate him and his work, and him and his personae, we deprive him of substance; we flatten him. When we fail to take him at his word, and recognize that his vocation is not only as a thinker or as a poet, or when we conflate these two not inimitable activities, we deprive him of his gift. We judge his thoughts while he wonders what others imagine. Are the moon’s seas reservoirs of the analogical imagination, or arid craters? does not even deserve to be described as a rhetorical question, and yet our prejudicial emotivism answers it. The typical reading has the shepherd express unqualified despair, but in the last stanza every clause begins with “maybe”. He has nothing to declare. The poem is speculative, not conclusive.

Like the unidentified speaker in “Broom,” the shepherd formulates and expresses every idea; the poem’s title identifies the poem as the shepherd’s own words. The moon serves in the poem a similar purpose to the blooming weed in “Broom:” the insentient becomes the prompt for an inquiry into the limits of sentience and sapience. To the shepherd the moon offers permanence, to the poem’s speaker broom offers fragrant impermanence: neither, in and of themselves, offers consolation. The speaker in “Broom” and the shepherd in “Night Song” console themselves with their inconsolable reflections. As readers we partake of their consolation even if the vision that prompts it is absolutely bereft, and devoid of comfort. Whatever one calls these objects— illusions, interpretations, supreme fictions—Leopardi is among the first and most eloquent advocates of fictions: not necessarily supreme, merely necessary.

in pain, I don’t experience pain as repetition
though I’ve knelt into nausea this way before
and bent, reminiscent of prayer or surrender
like looking again at Agnes Martin’s The Beach
the texture of a tissue protecting an engraving
pain touches the mind with a similar distance
entirely prepositional, dependent on proximity
an order bordering on the look of a thing
seen by a dreamer, my sense of self returns
without illness, a casual traveler, book in hand
glare flares from the page struck by sunlight