ABSTRACT
The contrast between subjectivism and universal ideas not only frames most of the criticism on Giacomo Leopardi in Britain. But also later emerges as a discourse framing Percy Bysshe Shelley's afterlives, and thus indicating the teleological views informing some of the critics' most notorious misprisions. At the end of the essay, George Henry Lewes distinguishes the nature of Leopardi's poetic genius from 'the cast of his thoughts', underlining the connection between the 'great writer' and the 'most unhappy man', and persuading the reader to 'admire the writer while condemning his opinions'. Together with the actual, technical difficulties of rendering Leopardi's poetic idiom into English, it is Leopardi's thought which has been considered the main impediment for a wider appreciation of his work. Although reception was at first sporadic, Leopardi's name had been appearing in a few anthologies of Italian literature, as well as in a few reviews of contemporary Italian writers.
