The Poetry of Eugenio Montale
The Poetry of Eugenio Montale
THE LITERARY WORK
Three collections of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm, Etc., published in Italian in 1925, 1939, and 1956, respectively; in English in 1959, 1978, 1987, and 1992.
SYNOPSIS
Montale’s poems reinvest with new meanings the medieval themes amor de lonh (“love from afar” tied to a sense of incompleteness and solitude) and donna angelicata (“angelic lady,” guide to the lover-poet from beyond). In thoroughly modern terms, his poems reflect on alienation and the attempt to communicate with an elusive other.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Born in Genova in 1896, Eugenio Montale began to study opera singing in 1915 for eight years, until the premature death of his teacher, the baritone Ernesto Sivori. He meanwhile (in 1916) started to write his first poems, which he described as musical in their inspiration. As a student at the University of Genova, Montale came into contact with the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Emile Boutroux, as well as with the music of Claude Debussy. Although Montale fought in the First World War in 1918, the experience did not shape his ongoing poetic production as much as would the advent of Fascism in 1922 or the Second World War. As the youngest son of a prosperous northern family’s, growing into adult-hood during this era, Montale inherited a sense of futility, which nurtured his tendency to dabble in one thing and another (he studied opera and philosophy, worked for his father as an accountant, wrote poetry, painted, and worked as a journalist). It seemed to him that most life choices are at best awkward attempts at meaning. In 1926 he joined the Bemporad publishing house in Florence and quickly became a central figure in the Florentine literary world. Montale was increasingly recognized as a major voice in Italian poetry, his focus on isolation and the im-possibility of communication resonating with the political disillusionment of his generation. In 1933 the poet began an intense love affair with the young Jewish-American scholar and writer Irma Brandeis, whom he considered following to the United States in 1938. Ultimately, however, Montale remained in Italy and moved in with Drusilla Tanzi; their relationship would last until her death in 1963. In 1943–44 Montale sheltered a number of writer friends forced into hiding from the Fascist government, including the poet Umberto Saba and the novelist Carlo Levi.
After the war, Montale joined the liberal political party Partito d’Azione and began to write for Italy’s leading daily, the Milanese II Corriere della Sera (The Evening Courier), going on to become an editor for the paper. He also reinvented his poetic style in Satura (1962; Miscellany), Diario del 71 e del 72 (1973; Diary of 71 and 72), and Quaderno di Quattro Anni (1977; Four Years’ Notebook), describing these postwar collections as the reverse, more biting side of his earlier production. In 1975 Montale won the Nobel Prize for Literature, after which he continued to pursue his poetic and journalistic activities until his death in Milan in 1981. Focusing on the nothingness of his own self and of an inescapably chaotic world, Montale was in his later years self-consciously ironic about poetry’s ability to communicate; this irony, however, is not without compassion for human solitude, and ultimately reflects Montale’s lifelong commitment to a poetic enchantment that is as unstable, as precious, and as mortal as ourselves.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Political and social disillusionment: the liberal era, Fascism, and its aftermath
As in the rest of Europe, Romanticism in Italy delved into the sublime solitude of a self confronted with the grandness of nature and the impossible realization of romantic love. Also as in other lands, Romanticism surfaced in Italy in the early nineteenth century, most intensely from about 1815 to 1827, a period of literary experimentation and debate in the still separate Italian states, which would unify only in 1861. Peculiar to Italy because of this circumstance was the association of familiar Romantic themes with the longing for an as-yet-absent Italian nation, the achievement of a linguistic, social, and political identity that would give shape to, if not transcend, solitude.
Italy’s political unification proved, however, to be a major disappointment in the 1860s, at least to the cultural elites. For them, unification failed to bridge the gap between industrialization in the North and poverty in the South, and between peasant and cosmopolitan identities. Furthermore, it did not resolve the conflict between an ideally cohesive Italian cultural tradition and the reality: religious skepticism, psychological fragmentation (connected to the rise of criminology and psychology), and the alienating force of modern capitalism and city life. During the liberal era, until the advent of Fascism in 1922, Italy’s coalition governments fell at an alarming rate, reflecting these unresolved tensions.
Along with political unification came an intense anxiety about Italy’s economic “backwardness,” especially with respect to the major colonial powers of England and France. This worry led to a radical transformation of the northern landscape through the growth of industry and urbanization, and to ecological disaster in the South through harmful agricultural practices. The dominant trends of the era, in turn, led to a crisis in Italian local identity, which had been closely tied to native landscapes and established social structures, which in some parts of the country were still largely feudal. Until he was nearly 30, Montale retreated at times to his family’s home on the Ligurian shore in northwest Italy, depicted as a shelter from these changes, a garden paradise, though humble as an orchard or vegetable plot. The atmosphere was pre-modern, the social life, intimate, amounting to what Montale experienced as a vanishing world. It was a physical vestige of the past to which World War II (which destroyed his other child-hood home, in Genova) would deal the last blow. The large majority of Italians lost one or more family’s members in World War I. As a soldier in this war, Montale witnessed mass death on an unprecedented scale. He seems to have experienced the Great War as a confirmation of the ceaseless chaotic violence of history, evoked recurrently in his poems. Consequently he reacted differently from the majority of Italians to Mussolini’s takeover of power in the country during the March on Rome in 1922. While many Italians saw it as a necessary, if violent, redressing of the failures of Italian unification and of wartime uncertainties, Montale was part of a minority who saw the troubled prewar liberal era and Fascist totalitarianism as part of a flawed continuum. As an editor and writer in Florence in the 1920s and 1930s, he became part of a group of intellectuals (others include Carlo Emilio Gadda, Carlo Levi, Mario Praz, and Umberto Saba) who refused involvement in Fascism, at times militantly and dangerously (Levi was sentenced to internal exile for his political activities), and at times by disengaging from history’s chaos and searching inward for their identity.
In the post-World War II era, after the fall of Fascism, Montale sided with Italian intellectuals who blamed the liberal era for the rise of Fascism in Italy. He also denounced the continuities between the Fascist leaders and the leaders of the Christian Democrat Party, which would govern Italy for more than 40 years after the war. For Montale, as for many dissenting left-wing Italians (and Europeans) from the 1940s through the 1960s, World War II became the very emblem for the rule of evil in the world and the bankrupt condition of Western civilization.
The crisis of individualism—Decadentism to Modernism
Decadence was a literary movement that began in France in the early 1880s. Named after the violent and dissolute period of the fall of the Roman Empire, the movement was shaped by a few writers (Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget, and Jean Moreas). It denounced but also sought to complete the breakdown of Western ideologies, drawing parallels between a loss of faith in language to communicate, early psychology’s discovery of a person’s inherent internal conflicts, concepts of society as warring forces (Marxism and Anarchism), and skepticism about a higher religious or overarching spiritual order. In France, as in Italy, a dominant metaphor for this crisis was that of illness (of self, society, and the world). The Italian cultural movement of Decadentism, however, differed from that of its French partner, in particular because it saw in the many avant-garde movements that appeared at the turn of the century not a cure for but a deepening of decadence. In the eyes of the anti-Fascist intellectuals, the success of Fascism in Italy only reinforced this despondent view.
The foremost figure of Italian Decadentism was Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938): in his novels, poems, and plays—but also in his nationalist speeches and symbolic World War I daredevil raids—he celebrated artifice. D’Annunzio championed the dandy, the “artist-superman” whose very life was a work of art, and the “superman-artist,” a spiritual leader who could transform politics into a supreme aesthetic spectacle. For Montale and other writers of his generation, D’Annunzio became a father-like figure, despite the fact that his work showed a fundamental ambivalence. D’Annunzio’s writings proposed art as the ultimate cure for the West’s illness, yet essentially they also asserted that there could be no real cure. His 1919 takeover of the city of Fiume, which D’Annunzio accomplished with a band of disgruntled World War I veterans, became a symbol for Montale’s generation. (The veterans were disgruntled because Italy, though a “winner” in the war suffered a “mutilated victory,” losing territories in Dalmatia, where Fiume was located.) In December 1920 under international pressure, the Italian government bombed the city, ending the takeover and driving D’Annunzio into over 20 years of more-or-less voluntary solitude, in a home on Lake Garda.
There were artistic trends that tried to overcome the crisis in spirit and values reflected in Decadent art. Two responses emerged: first, from a collection of late-nineteenth-century poets known as the I crepuscular poets (from crepuscolo, or “sunset”) and second, from the early-twentieth-century Futurist artists (see The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). The crepuscular poets tried to focus on humble objects, people, and places tied to local and temporary contexts in the countryside, a strategy that enabled them to by-pass the ideal of a modern art at one with social and political life. In contrast, Futurism found hope in the impersonal machine, the chaotic violence of modern city life, and the transforming capacity of war. Neither of these artistic responses solved the cultural crisis, however. A melancholy or sense of tacit loss surrounded the verse of the crepuscular poets, and Futurism’s very reliance on the mechanical meant that it was just opposing an established order with another less visible, more abstract, but no less individually stifling order.
The main figures of what could be considered the Italian version of High Modernism (Ermetismo, or “Hermeticism”) are Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Umberto Saba (see Ungaretti’s Life of a Man , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). Though quite different from one another, the three have in common an overt desire no longer to overcome Decadentism’s illness, but rather to face with courage the impossibility of a cure and the loss of any overarching, timeless, or externally objective truth. For Montale, the self is at once inescapably determined by the everyday and at the same time in search of an escape route, and the escape lies not in the discovery of an alternative order, but in the acceptance of disgorder. The central image of Cuttlefish Bones is the self as a very small, pared-down, beautiful but useless debris buffeted by a history that is over-arching but out of control:
Oh, tumbled then
like the cuttlefish bone by the waves,
to vanish bit by bit;
(Montale, Eugenio Montale: Collected Poems, p. 143)
Montale seeks acceptance of this self instead of a melancholy and crepuscular meditation on its vanishing.
The Poems in Focus
Contents summary
“Chrysalis” (from Cuttlefish Bones) focuses on the ephemeral quality of attempts at salvation. In “The hope of even seeing you again…” (from The Occasions), the poet discovers in a flash that on rare occasions reality offers up objects that recall the beloved and open at least a temporary possibility of communication. In “Iris” (from The Storm, Etc.), these elements come together. Montale finds in his absent lady’s capacity for her own self-transcendence a relief from his personal conviction that truth can only be subjective, human, and possible but uncertain.
“Chrysalis”
This poem interweaves the themes central to Montale’s first collection, Cuttlefish Bones, focusing on passing traces of the absent lady, on the poet’s experience of them as a sort of despairing or existential “limbo,” and finally on his hope that the experience itself may be a form of communication that provides salvation. The poem opens with a wintery garden just barely awakened by “the breath of April,” in which “quivers in the air” seem to beckon; in the second stanza, movement intensifies as the poet experiences “amazement” as well as “an undertow of memories” in which “time plummets,” leading him to “reach/for this sunlit occurrence” from his “dark lookout” (Collected Poems, p. 115-17). This is not an ecstatic moment—the poet is constantly aware of his position in a darker present—but rather a reaching downward and inward into time past to invoke the presence of the lady. As is true for almost all of Montale’s poems, the absent one—addressed mostly as “tu” (the singular “you”), but at times as “voi” (the plural and more formal “you”)—is related to a specific person and real events, with an overlay of memories of other persons and events. Montale in his darker present cannot always separate one unique memory from another. In the third stanza, he compares the fleeting quality of “this sunlit occurrence” to the few essential moments of connection he has shared with another, stating finally that the mystery of life and joy lies only in such moments (Collected Poems, p. 115).
You are my prey, who offer me
one brief hour of human fervor.
I don’t want to waste an instant:
this is my share, and nothing else has meaning;
My wealth is this beating that
moves in you and lifts
your face to the sky; this slow
staring around of eyes that can now see.
(Collected Poems, pp. 115–17)
In the following two stanzas, an “opaque/shadow” envelops the moment and the memory, leaving the poet “in the bleak limbo of dissolved existences,” in which even the signs of spring that seemed to beckon become “a barren secret” (Collected Poems, p. 117). The poet turns to the ocean, where “illusion can arise/and release its mists” so that there seems to appear “among the shoals” “in the hazy afternoon” “the bark of our salvation,” which awaits, immobile, unable to give us direction (Collected Poems, p. 117). Finally, in the longest and last stanza, Montale at once expresses his desolation at how everything passes, how all is borne away by time, fixed in memory but unattainable, known through signs (like the bark) that offer no certain direction. At the same time, he opens himself to the hope that desolation itself conceals a truth, that in offering it to his absent lady, he might reach out to her joy:
Ah chrysalis, how bitter
is this nameless torture that envelops us
and spirits us away—
till not even our footprints last in the dust;
and we’ll go on, not having moved
a single stone in the great wall;
and maybe everything is fixed, is written,
and we’ll never see it come our way:
freedom, the miracle,
the act that wasn’t pure necessity!
...................
the pact I want to make
with destiny: to redeem
your joy through my condemning.
This is the hope that lives in my heart.
(Collected Poems, pp. 117-19)
Ultimately the poem’s title, referring to the cocooned pupa of the butterfly (in Ancient Greek the word is psyche, which also means soul), suggests that the lady’s soul or personhood is not so much lost in shadow as it is enveloped and protected from the illusions of memory, so that, however prone to vanish, she remains potentially present.
“The hope of ever seeing you again …”
Typical of Montale’s second collection, The Occasions, this poem is mainly inspired, as is the whole collection, by the departure of Irma Brandeis, and Montale’s intense experience of absence and separation. There is a distinctly medieval inspiration in the lady’s disappearance behind a screen that is the world of appearances in which we are enmeshed. Also specific to this second collection is the poem’s movement from memory toward the mystery of the objects that awakened it, which are made most palpably present at the end without revealing exactly how memory works. There is a disconcerting image of “jackals on a leash” whether real or part of a whimsical shared moment, the image recalls for Montale an instant of connection with his lady so intensely personal that it must remain mostly unsaid. “Occasions,” then, are moments in which memory simply is, in its vividness and power, beyond any possible explanation.
The hope of even seeing you again
was leaving me;
and I asked myself if this which keeps me from
all sense of you, this screen of images,
is marked by death, or if, out of the past,
but deformed and diminished, it entails
some flash of yours:
(under the arcades, at Modena,
a servant in gold braid led
two jackals on a leash).
(Collected Poems, p. 197)
“Iris”
In his third collection, The Storm, Etc., Montale confronts most directly a struggle that is central to the Italian love lyric, giving it a uniquely modern interpretation. The struggle is one between the earthly temporal experience and transcendent absolutes, and it surfaces in “Iris.” A poem again inspired by Irma Brandeis, “Iris” now links her absence to the poet’s sense of God’s withdrawal from the world. The first three stanzas (separated from the other four by ellipses denoting distance and a gap in understanding), evoke the Canadian landscape the poet imagines surrounding Irma Brandeis, superimposing upon it two symbolic interpretations. On the one hand, it is Saint Martin’s day (November 1st), suggestive for Italians of Indian summer and the contrast of bright sunlight and “berries” with the oncoming cold (Collected Poems, p. 355). On the other hand, the oxymoron of “icy fire” and the red “poppies” in the bleak white of winter recall “the bloodied Face [of Christ] on the shroud” and, most important, his double nature, at once human and divine (Collected Poems, p. 355). Hence the poet describes himself as a “poor dismayed Nestorian,” referring to Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople who was banished to the desert for affirming that there existed in Jesus not one human and divine nature, but two separate ones, of which the human (compassion and suffering) was most important (Collected Poems, p. 574). The first part of the poem concludes with Montale’s reassertion of concrete and historically situated suffering (World War II: “the shipwreck of my people [the Italians]/and yours [the Jews]”), within which the only “rosary,” or trace of salvation, is his image of his beloved in her landscape, which radiates a light reminiscent of Christian salvation (Collected Poems, p. 355). In the second part of the poem, Montale contrasts the cruelty of the wildcat lynx with the coldness of a domestic cat, the “lovely tabby,” which is “Syrian,” a detail that alludes to the Near East and Irma Brandeis’s origins (Collected Poems, p. 575). The lines can be read to mean that the cat and the lynx seem the same from the distance that separates her world from his, an almost transcendent distance, intimating that what divides humans from one another is not time and space but something more primordial. Finally in the last two stanzas, Montale evokes Irma Brandeis’s own destiny as a Jew and an exile in search of a promised land, shaped by the common suffering of her people: distinct from Montale’s own destiny, her life nonetheless embodies for him a compassion linked to Christ’s humanity, the sign of an earthly salvation, a possible respite from human separation and separateness. Even though life has changed for both the poet and his beloved, and no concrete reunion is possible for them, they remain connected by his hope that through her work she may succeed in gaining the sense of self-transcendence that he cannot find.
So that your work (which is a form of His) might flourish in other lights,
Iris of Canaan, you deliquesced
into that halo of mistletoe and holly
which bears your heart into the night
of the world, beyond the mirage
of the desert flowers, your kin.
If you appear, you bring me here again,
under the pergola of barren vines
by the landing on our river—and the ferry’s not returning,
the Indian summer sun dissolves, goes black.
But if you come back, you’re not you,
your earthly history is changed,
you don’t wait for the prow at the pier,
you watch for nothing: yesterday or tomorrow;
for His work (which is transforming into yours) has to continue.
(Collected Poems, pp. 355–57)
The title of the poem, “Iride,” which can be rendered as iris of the eye, iris as flower, rainbow, and iridescence, suggests most of all the indecipherable yet radiant light, ambiguously individual and transcendent, left by Montale’s beloved in her departure.
Individual love, history, and contingent salvation
Montale’s three main collections were written during the Fascist and post-World War II eras. His poetry therefore reflects the double alienation of a generation that experienced modernity not only as the loss of local community and landscape to industrialization, but also as the rise of totalitarian states that deprive the individual of freedom in its most basic sense: to shape one’s existence and search for meaning in life beyond the restrictions of one particular ideology or another. In these years, his poems were known mainly through a few small literary journals, including II Baretti, edited by the anti-Fascist Piero Gobetti, and Solaria, founded by Montale and other dissident writers in Florence). Yet the poems were highly influential because of their sharp critique of the present as a “barren limbo” in which it was nonetheless urgent for the individual to experience love and to search for meaning beyond the self. His reputation and his poetry’s focus on personal internal struggles allowed Montale to avoid Fascist censorship. As a defender of human-centered values, he could appear to be relatively neutral politically, yet succeed under a totalitarian regime, in conveying to a generation of aspiring writers the urgent need to respect the individual. In this context, Montale’s poetry is an unprecedented reinvention of the traditional love lyric, on two levels. First, he reformulates an old search to transcend the self that shows up in Italian literary works (such as Petrarch’s Secretum) into a modern question about what the search means and whether it is truly possible to know someone else. Second, he painfully acknowledges how the forces of history infringe on any search for self-transcendence, recognizing that even spiritual quests are shaped by material conditions. His poetry sees in love a possible—but improbable and ambiguous—salvation:
Maybe I’ll find a face again:
[…]
I reach for it, and feel
another life becoming mine, encumbered
with a form that was taken from me;
and it’s hair, not leaves, that winds
round my fingers like rings.
Then nothing more.
(Collected Poems, p. 139)
You know: I have to give you up again
and I can’t. […]
I’m after the lost sign, the single
pledge you graced me with.
And hell is certain.
(Collected Poems, p. 193)
In the Divine Comedy , Dante distinguishes between sacred and profane love, and is guided toward the end of his journey through the after-life by the spirit of his beloved Beatrice, who leads him to a final reunion with the divine essence (also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). Montale implicitly questions Dante’s delineation of the category “profane” or “infernal” love. As Dante explains it, initially his love for Beatrice was profane; later it was entirely spiritualized. Montale questions this clear-cut distinction, insisting that from a modern, secular viewpoint, the sacred and profane stem from the same source. His lady is therefore, at once she who “burned with love/for Him who moved her,” meaning, an angelic guide, and “the ghost of memory,” a “phantom” who is perhaps an illusion or mere projection of desire (Collected Poems, pp. 377, 379, 5).
Sources and literary context
More than any other Modernist poet, Montale draws on the tradition of the Italian and Provengal love lyric, revisiting some of its core elements, such as the tension between sacred love and profane love, the lover’s tormented search for traces or tokens of love from his lady, his lonely introspection, and finally the disconnection between love and history. The title of Montale’s third collection, The Storm, echoes Dante’s Inferno 5, which includes the adulterous lovers Paolo and Francesca, condemned to eternal uprootedness in an infernal gale (“bufera infernal,” that is, storm), and to endless regret for the “profane” love they briefly shared. Drawing on the “Dolce stil novo” (Sweet New Style) that preceded Dante’s Comedy, and on troubadour lyrics, Montale insists on the painful ambivalence of signals given by the lady and of the objects that are her emblems (also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). Hence
Montale’s Complex Language
Montale’s use of language reflects his sense of complexity in life: hypothetical phrases, questions, and a constant return to contradiction and paradox are some of his standard practices. They are central to his sharp questioning of language’s power to communicate arid describe. One of his earliest statements to this effect is from Cuttlefish Bones:
Don’t ask us for the word to square
our shapeless spirit on all sides,
[…]
This, today, is all we can tell you:
what we are not what we do not want.
(Collected Poems, p. 39)
Montale draws on his experience in music:, on French Symbolist poetry, and on medieval Italian poetry for this strategy of speaking negatively. The strategy tries first to achieve the allusiveness of music, in particular its moments of counterpoint and dissonance. Second is the impact of the French Symbolist poets, who associated their verse not only with music but also with beautiful but mysterious objects whose true essence or purpose remains hidden. Third, Montale is inspired by negative theology in the works of such early Italian poets as Guido Cavalcanti, whose systematic negation of all that has been previously asserted leads one to experience a “nothingness”. This nothingness is ironically vaster and fuller than all the terms that fail to circumscribe it. These are the factors that help shape such poems as Montale’s “The Garden (ellipses ours):
I don’t know …
...............
I don’t know if…
...............
I don’t know if your muffled step,
...............
I don’t know if your step that makes
my veins throb…
...............
I don’t know if the hand grazing my shoulder
...............
…If the power
that drives the disk [LP, record] already etched were another
surely your destiny conjoined with mine
would show a single groove.
(Collected Poems, pp. 363–65)
the ray of light radiating from the beloved’s fore-head and eyes (a typical image for love’s action in medieval writings) is at once a “sign [that] was right” and “a glare that snares the eyes,” a deceitful trap (Collected Poems, pp. 407, 43). Also for Montale, unlike the medieval poets, the emblems themselves constantly change in meaning, so there can be no victory or defeat in love, only uncertainty.
The poet’s introspection here comes to the fore, as it did following Dante in love poetry written in the style of Petrarch’s verse: the psychological effects of love become more important than the lady herself, and the self-absorbed poet struggles with his own pensier (“thought” see Petrarch’s Canzoniere , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). But whereas Petrarch’s solitude leads to an understanding of the self as a meaningful microcosm of the world, in Montale solitude is never fully distinguishable from the idea that the self is all that has reality or that one can know in life. In such a context, thought and even poetry itself may be nothing more than empty self-pity:
and the dark voice love dictates
goes hoarse, becomes whining writing
(Collected Poems, p. 77)
The traditions set for the love lyric underwent change in the nineteenth century, taking on a new form. The early-nineteenth-century Romantics saw unrealizable love, both for the beloved and for the nation (in the poetry of Ugo Foscolo, in particular), as an ennobling tragic passion. Later, this view was undercut by the Decadent Movement, whose members regarded such passion as an illness.
Affected by new disciplines like psychology, many of the twentieth-century reflections on love have explored the emptiness of desire. In contrast, Montale insists that passion’s very failure can be productive. What elicits desire is, in his view, greater, more complex and more contradictory than what desire can grasp. Also, for Montale, one must take into account the events of history; its unpredictability is what makes all gestures such as love momentary and uncertain. Irma Brandeis, to whom the following lines are dedicated, was wrested away from Montale, as he saw it, by her Jewish American identity and the realities of World War II.
the blind have failed to see
the omen of your incandescent forehead,
the line I’ve etched in blood there, cross and chrism
charm calamity vow farewell
perdition and salvation;
(Collected Poems, p. 393)
Aside from drawing on the Italian love lyric tradition, Montale’s poetry was shaped by conversations with his contemporaries, in particular with the two Italian poets Giuseppe Ungaretti and Umberto Saba. To varying degrees, they all turned to the French Symbolists as a way to bridge the gap between Romanticism and the present in Italian poetry. Montale saw in the isolation of the poetic word and in the finiteness of objects a potentially enriching, if negative, experience of the connection he longed for, a longing for contact with the other that although unrealized was nevertheless real. Other influences on Montale were his conversations with the American-born Ezra Pound, from whom Montale gained his appreciation of the sense of infinite yearning and pain in the British poetry of Robert Browning. Returning to Italian influences, he undercuts this sense with an irony linked to the skepticism, self-deprecation, and idea of an “existence imagined but not achieved” apparent in the writing of Italo Svevo (Collected Poems, p. 471; see Zeno’s Conscience , also in WLAIT 7: Italian Literature and Its Times). What was the impact of all these influences? In the end, Montale’s poetry evolved less as a spiritual journey into the self than as a paring down of the self to make room for yearning.
Reception
For a small literary circle Montale’s work came to represent an emphasis on individual freedom in contrast with Fascist repression. But it was only after World War II that he became a major player, both in Italy’s postwar cultural renewal, as a journalist, and internationally, as a representative of that renewal. Montale’s visits to the American-English writer T. S. Eliot in 1948 and to the French writer Albert Camus in 1953 are markers of his increasing international presence. Major studies of his work include West’s Eugenio Montale, Poet on the Edge (1981), based in part on interviews with the poet, Cambon’s Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: a Dream in Reason’s Presence (1982), as well as Biasin’s Montale, Debussy, and Modernism (1989). Most important, Montale’s first three collections appeared in Jonathan Galassi’s translation in 1998. The fruit of many years of meditation on Montale, it is both lyrically successful and explanatory. Accompanying the poems is a thorough discussion that makes Montale’s main works far more accessible to English-speaking audiences than the works of his Italian contemporaries. For Galassi, the import of Montale lies in his ability to confront in verses the “terrors and failings of the present” as well as “the great ruin of the past,” yet at the same time convey a hint of faith “in his dream, in himself, in the essential power of poetry” (Collected Poems, pp. 426-27).
—Laura Wittman
For More Information
Becker, Jared. Eugenio Montale. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
Biasin, Gian-Paolo. Montale, Debussy, and Modernism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Brook, Clodagh J. The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: Metaphor, Negation, and Silence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Cambon, Glauco. Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Dream in Reason’s Presence. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1982.
Cary, Joseph. Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale. New York: New York University Press, 1993.
Huffman, Claire de C. L. Montale and the Occasions of Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Montale, Eugenio. Eugenio Montale: Collected Poems, 1920-1958. Ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
Petrucciani, Mario. La poetica dell’ermetismo italiano. Torino: Loascher, 1955.
West, Rebecca J. Eugenio Montale, Poet on the Edge. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Montale,1981.