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Giacomo Leopardi's Poetics and Pessimism in the Work And he loved light rather than darkness: Giacomo Leopardi’s Poetics and Pessimism in the Work of Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and A. E. Housman by Rose Sneyd Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University Halifax, Nova Scotia November 2018 © Copyright by Rose Sneyd, 2018 Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...iii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….iv Chapter one: Introduction.……………………………………………………………...…………1 Chapter two: Leopardi’s Philosophy and Poetics...………………………….…...……………...39 Chapter three: Matthew Arnold and Giacomo Leopardi: Modernist Lyric Poetics and Stoic Pessimism in “Dover Beach”…….……………………………………………………................61 Chapter four: Titanic pessimism vs. “Happy and Gracious Flexibility”: The Leopardian Context of Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Empedocles on Etna”……..……...…............101 Chapter five: Daniel Deronda, Leopardi’s “To Italy,” and George Eliot’s Cultural Cosmopolitanism………………………………………………………………….....................151 Chapter six: The Structure of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and Leopardi’s Canti…………...198 Chapter seven: Conclusion...…………………………………………………………………...245 Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………….…....249 ii Abstract This thesis examines a selection of the work of three Victorian writers: Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and A. E. Housman, in light of their interest in the Romantic-era Italian poet-philosopher Giacomo Leopardi. While often described as Italy’s greatest poet apart from Dante, Leopardi has attracted only very slight attention from anglophone literary critics and scholars. The extensive bodies of literary criticism on Arnold, Eliot, and Housman, for instance, contain just a handful of essays that discuss their (explicitly acknowledged) interest in Leopardi. This thesis is an attempt to (begin to) rectify this neglect. It commences by examining Leopardi in his Romantic context and the way he was criticised by the Victorian periodical press, before turning to a brief examination of Leopardi’s generally unfamiliar poetics and philosophy. The remainder of the thesis is divided into four chapters, the first two treating Arnold’s response to Leopardi, the third Eliot’s, and the fourth Housman’s. These writers were selected not only for the conspicuous nature of their responses to Leopardi, but, of course, for the significance of these responses and how they furnish interesting new perspectives on the Victorian writers’ own work. But Arnold, Eliot, and Housman were also chosen as providing a representative cross-section of different Victorian responses to Leopardi. Arnold, who was seminal in introducing Leopardi to an anglophone Victorian readership, responded primarily to Leopardi’s poetics and his solidarist- pessimistic philosophy, especially in the conclusion to “Dover Beach.” In contrast to Arnold (and to Housman), Eliot responded most intensely to Leopardi’s early republican poetry and, in particular, to an important ode of his – “All’Italia” – that is repeatedly quoted in her final novel Daniel Deronda. And Housman, unsurprisingly, was fascinated by Leopardi’s pessimistic philosophy, which informs the structure of A Shropshire Lad. While prioritising close textual readings of all four writers, this thesis also examines what such readings reveal about Arnold’s, Eliot’s, and Housman’s philosophical approaches. Thus, this thesis examines the work of pessimistic philosophers, such as Arthur Schopenhauer and Leopardi himself, but also to the work of, for instance, the seventeenth century philosopher Giambattista Vico and the modern Cosmopolitan Kwame Anthony Appiah. iii Acknowledgements As an international PhD candidate at Dalhousie University, I have been particularly grateful for the financial support I received throughout my programme. The Faculty of Graduate Studies initially awarded me the FGS Fellowship for the 2013 and 2014 academic years, which allowed me to come in the first place, and the Killam Trusts and Dalhousie University subsequently awarded me the Killam predoctoral scholarship for the 2015 and 2016 academic years, which was essential to my being able to focus on thesis-writing. Finally, FGS’s assistance in my final year with the NSGS Scholarship (2017-2018) was invaluable, as was Lynne and Clyde Evans’ generous assistance with their Graduate Scholarship in English (2016). None of this funding would have reached me without the dedicated support of Dalhousie’s Department of English, which I have found to be a great advocate of its students. A special note of thanks to the Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University, Texas, for hosting me in February 2017 on a Visiting Scholar fellowship. I had a lovely, studious time in the ABL reading room thinking about Matthew Arnold and Vico, among other things. I am truly grateful to Dr Marjorie Stone for her wonderful generosity as a supervisor. Thanks for your immediate enthusiasm when I emailed you my proposal from New Zealand all those years ago; for so actively responding to and commenting on my thesis, but also all my other work that I have shown you over the years; and for championing my cause throughout the programme. Many thanks also to Dr Rohan Maitzen for the rigorous criticism that so often helped me to improve my work, and to Dr Judith Thompson, whose infectious enthusiasm renewed my own right when I most needed it! iv Chapter one: Introduction I. Why Leopardi In 1979, Italo Calvino made this assessment of the sharp disjunction between Leopardi’s reputation in Italy and his reputation elsewhere: For [Italians] Leopardi is a presence that gets increasingly bigger and closer; for a long time, every literary generation constructed its own Leopardi, different to that of the preceding generations, and [each generation] defined itself via its definition of Leopardi; and Leopardi can bear all these experiences. And yet, outside the borders of Italy, Leopardi, simply, does not exist. (72-73)1 Leopardi’s “non-existence” in England, in particular, is a common theme of the nineteenth- century criticism of the Italian poet; again, and again, critics emphasise Leopardi’s “obscurity.” George Henry Lewes, for instance, writes that “[t]o English ears [the name Leopardi] is a mere sound signifying nothing” (659). An anonymous writer in the Prospective Review “imagine[s]” that “[f]ew of our countrymen…have read the writings, not many even heard the name, of one of the most remarkable men of modern Italy” (157). And Margaret Oliphant can claim in the 1860s that “[t]he works of Leopardi are so little known in England, that it is scarcely presumption to fancy that it is a new poet whom we are about to introduce to a large number of our readers” (“Giacomo Leopardi” 459). But this neglect is not confined to the nineteenth-century – as Calvino’s comment implies; in fact, it was highlighted very recently by the pre-eminent Leopardi scholar Franco D’Intino in the introduction to the complete English translation of Leopardi’s notebook-miscellany – the Zibaldone – that he and Michael Caesar edited, the publication of 1 All translations of Calvino’s paper are my own. 1 which was a truly seminal event in the reception of Leopardi in the English-speaking world. “Giacomo Leopardi is the most radical and challenging of nineteenth-century poets and thinkers,” D’Intino points out, “yet the recognition of his genius outside his native Italy has been sporadic, at times enthusiastic and engaged, at others distracted” (“Introduction” xi). And yet Leopardi is undoubtedly one of the most important poets of the entire tradition of Italian poetry – perhaps second in importance only to Dante. It is thus that the publisher introduced Leopardi on the book jacket to D’Intino and Caesar’s translation of the Zibaldone: “Giacomo Leopardi is widely recognized as Italy’s finest modern lyric poet, for many the greatest after Dante.” This assertion is, in fact, a common theme for cover copy of Leopardi editions (in both Italian and English). On the book jacket of Patrick Creagh’s translation of Leopardi’s Moral Essays, Leopardi is described as “Italy’s greatest writer after Dante – poet, scholar, and essayist,” and on the reverse of Ugo Dotti’s important scholarly edition of Leopardi’s Canti, he is described, somewhat superfluously, as being “of noble family” but also as “one of the greatest poets and thinkers of Europe.” Such comments are not confined to the outside of editions of Leopardi’s work. The editor of Dover’s Introduction to Italian Poetry, Luciano Rebay, refers to Leopardi as “one of the greatest Italian poets of all times” (103), and in his monumental Storia della Letteratura Italiana, Dotti calls Leopardi the “greatest poet of the nineteenth-century and, probably, of our modern times” (485).2 Leopardi’s Canti are, according to their most recent English language translator, Jonathan Galassi, now recognised as “one of the most influential works of the nineteenth-century” in European literature (Introduction xiii). Given Leopardi’s stature in the canon of Italian – and European – poetry, given the small resurgence in Anglophone interest in his writing (as represented by the work of scholars and 2 All translations of Dotti’s history are my own. 2 translators such as D’Intino, Caesar, and Galassi), and given the singular “power” Italy “exercised” upon “the British imagination in the mid-nineteenth-century” (Cotsell 29), it is surprising that so little has been written on the various ways in which nineteenth-century English writers responded
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