From a small town in the Papal States, a hunchbacked young man with ruined health looked out at the stars and the hedgerows and wrote some of the most beautiful poems in any language about the impossibility of happiness. Giacomo Leopardi's Canti, gathered in their final form in 1835, comprise the supreme achievement of Italian Romantic poetry, though they resist every consolation Romanticism typically offers. Nature is not a refuge here but a blind and indifferent force. Yet the poems themselves are luminous, their music so pure it seems to contradict their own philosophy. Leopardi's great secret is that the act of naming sorrow with such precision becomes, against all argument, a form of joy.