"The modern poet". On the simple and sentimental poetry of Leopardi

This essay looks at the shift in Leopardi's writing around 1819 from "imagination" to "sentiment" and offers a definition of the "modern poet" as a philosopher who is able to go beyond the illusions conjured up by previous poetry through an awareness of the new condition of poetry and of its practitioners. With reference to Holderlin and Keats or Schiller, it looks at the passage from a "fantastic" Stimmung to a "sentimental" one. According to Leopardi, only the ancients were true poets. However, a new awareness of modernity makes it possible to perceive and emphasise the distance between image and reality, highlighting their radical divergence.