SOLITARY SOULS, POETIC MINDS: EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886) AND GIACOMO LEOPARDI (1798-1837), A COMPARISON (by Alessandro and Sara)

The first thing they share is melancholy: a result of a higher sensitivity that allowed the two to put emotions in their words – and to take them away, in a certain sense, from their worlds.
The two poets spent their life writing alone, in their room, in a sort of self-induced reclusion. Solitude was their choice and such a terrible and sweet companion at the same time.

We see these two faces of solitude depicted in their writings. Dickinson wrote, in “There is a solitude of space”

“[…] A soul admitted to itself -   
                Finite Infinity”;

while Leopardi projects himself into a “solitary bird” as we can see in the homonym poem:

               Solitary bird, you sing […]

you gaze pensively, apart, at it all:
no companions, and no flight,
no pleasures call you, no play:
you sing, […]

Ah, how like
your ways to mine!

Another point of intersection between the two is to be found in eternity and imagination.

In this sense, Dickinson’s “Come slowly – Eden” is our choice, where the space that separates the two stanzas has the same function of the hedgerow in “Infinite”, by Leopardi:

“Always to me beloved was this lonely hillside
And the hedgerow creeping over and always hiding
The distances, the horizon's furthest reaches. […]

    Leopardi, “Infinito”

Dickinson’s poem being divided in 2 stanzas, one could think of this stylistic division to reflect the division of the poet from pleasure. While Eden is first referenced in the first line of the first stanza, the act of fulfilment is only reached in the very last line, in the second stanza - thus suggesting a sense of eternity.

Similarly, as we’ve anticipated, the hedgerow separates the Italian poet from all the beautiful things he’s prevented to see.

However, this separation becomes for Leopardi a source a pleasure itself, obtained through

Imagination:

[…]

remembering the seasons,
Quiet in dead eternity, and the present,
Living and sounding still. And into this
Immensity my thought sinks ever drowning,
And it is sweet to shipwreck in such a sea.

Imagination proves to be fundamental for the American poet too, as she writes in a poem:

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover, and a bee, And revery. The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

.

Sharing characteristics, both from their lives and their poetry, Emily Dickinson and Giacomo Leopardi are likely to be compared for who they were: two solitary souls, and two beautifully poetic minds.