Romantic pessimism and classical philology

Giacomo Leopardi

1798 – 1837

Count Giacomo Leopardi was Italy's greatest nineteenth-century lyric poet and a radical philosophical pessimist whose Operette morali (1827) expressed a systematic philosophy of cosmic indifference and human futility rooted in ancient Greek and Latin sources. Though not an occultist, his deep engagement with classical mythology, his sense of the sacred as irrevocably lost, and his vision of humanity abandoned by the gods made him a touchstone for later Symbolist, Decadent, and esoteric traditions that mourned the withdrawal of the divine from the modern world. His Canti remain essential for understanding the mythological melancholy that permeates nineteenth-century European occult sensibility.