Vera o falsa riga dantesca del pensiero poetico leopardiano verso il termine dello Zibaldone

In one of the last pages of his Zibaldone, Leopardi cites the famous passage from Purgatorio XXIV, where Dante defines his poetry as the activity of a penman to whom Love dictates. While assumed as a cornerstone of Leopardi's conception of poetry, the Dantean apophthegm – «I' mi son un che quando Amor mi spira noto» (One am I, who, whenever Love doth inspire me, note) – is deliberately and significantly altered, as the quotation states: «I' mi son un che quando Natura parla ec.» (One am I, who, whenever Nature speaks etc.). The dissertation aims to grasp the most of the critical and hermeneutical fecondity of this passage, quite noteworthy notwithstanding its shortness and apparently fortuitousness, and above all its ‘strange’ ambiguity. In order to decipher Leopardi's altered quotation, the investigation researches the complex array of relationships linking his aestetic with some of the most relevant aspects of his vast philosophical speculation: the poetic and ethical concept of naturality; the cognitive and antropological process of the habit; the importance of human imagination and of human disposition to the lyrical expression of himself; the leading, if ambivalent, ethical principle of ‘amor proprio’ (self-love) and its connections with Leopardi's original re-thinking of poetic sublime. Following the path of innovation and continuity, change and repetition, difference and analogy, which is implicitly traced by the intertestual device of the modified quotation, the thesis establishes a comparison between Leopardi's speculative achievements concerning the idea of poetry and Dante's analogues. As a result, the quotation appears to throw up a bridge across centuries of speculative thinking about poetry, affirming the universal value of a conception of poetry hinged on the essential elements of the lyric expression of the self, of human imagination structuring individual creativity and of the sublime leap guiding and animating it.