Eugenio Montale

Italian poet

• Born: October 12, 1896
• Birthplace: Genoa, Italy
• Died: September 12, 1981
• Place of death: Milan, Italy

Montale was the foremost Italian poet of the twentieth century and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975. With his contemporaries Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, Montale created a modern Italian poetry of international significance: honest, poignant, serious, and wise.

Early Life

Eugenio Montale (yew-ZHEHN-yoh mohn-TAH-lay) was born in Genoa, Italy, to a father who owned an import firm. The family Montale’s mother and his three elder brothers and one elder sister would travel to the father’s native place of Monterosso on the Ligurian coast every summer. Eugenio Montale returned there each summer through his first thirty years. He loved both the lonely splendor of the Italian coastline and the activity of turn-of-the-century Genoa. While he knew the local dialects and grew familiar with the typical mix of rich and poor in the city, he also became entranced by the beauty of the small coastal villages. The formative influences of these places would later color his poetry.

Montale did not attend a university. He was drawn toward a musical career as a singer, but the death of his teacher and his father’s objections dissuaded him. Montale went through his early life with no clear idea of a career. His mother died, and he was, as the youngest, the favorite son. He was called up to serve in the army for two years in 1917, training in Parma and then moving to the front in Trentino.

After World War I, Montale returned to Genoa and stayed there until 1927, cofounding the Turin review Primo tempo (1922) and becoming acquainted with the writers and critics of the day. Being unemployed for most of the time, he read voraciously: Poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, and Charles Baudelaire, as well as the “prose-poet” Maurice de Guérin, Henry James, and philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Benedetto Croce captured his attention. Montale used the libraries, held long discussions with friends, and began to send out poems, essays, and reviews to the literary and popular press. He was quick to appreciate the quality of Italo Svevo, writing an “Omaggio” (homage) in 1925 that virtually created Svevo’s Italian reputation. Montale became famous with the publication of his first book, Ossi di seppia (1925; Bones of the Cuttlefish , 1984). In 1927, he left Genoa for Florence, where he remained for some twenty years before going on to Milan and a full-time appointment as a literary editor for the newspaper Corriere della sera.

Life’s Work

Montale’s poetry draws on the stark, rocky coastal landscapes of his youth. The poetry flourished throughout his career as a journalist and developed along with his interest in music and painting. Bones of the Cuttlefish gathered these interests and fused them in a mature, poised, stylish poetry of compact and passionate lyricism, bringing together evocations of youthful energy, the vivid landscapes of Monterosso, and the sense of an inimical world. It was a unique, unrepeatable achievement, mixing tones of longing and loneliness, isolation and love, in acknowledgment not only of the remorselessness of material existence but also of human care and hope for the safety of others. Montale is unflinching in his understanding of human vulnerability on the cosmic scale and is reminiscent of the grim, visionary Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi in his tenacity and depth. Memories, suspended emotions, symbolic presences of sea and coastline Montale shares certain tonalities with T. S. Eliot. He resolutely refuses easy consolations and brings himself to terms with a world between the wars, in which living is compared to following a wall “with bits/of broken bottle glass on top” (“Meriggiare pallido e assorto”). Correspondingly, Montale’s versification surprises, with lines suddenly extending or contracting and with dissonant half-rhymes and old rhythmic effects. He departs from traditional prosody as he draws on his memories of youth. Yet, the knowledge that the period of youthful innocence is over and that prosodic traditions have been broken as well lends a startling immediacy and a resilient vitality to his first book.

On arriving in Florence in 1927, Montale began work for the publisher Bemporad, but a year later was made director of the famous and prestigious literary and scientific library, the Gabinetto Vieusseux. He was the only candidate for the post not a member of the Fascist Party. In 1938, when Fascism had become much more powerful, his abstention from overt political life worked against him. He resigned from his post at that time rather than be coerced into joining the party. He married, and throughout World War II, he lived in occupied Florence. He was by then writing for various important Florentine journals, and Einaudi published his second book of poems, Le occasioni (1939; the occasions). Here, Montale’s most famous poems (“Dora Markus,” “Motetti,” “La casa dei doganiari,” and “Eastbourne”) reveal a great personal depth, focused on the love of a woman Montale’s persona names Clizia. She is both a real, suffering person and a symbolic force crystallizing life and poetry, transforming fiction and reality. The volume marks the increased extent of the autobiographical aspect in Montale’s poetry. Separation and loss, reunion and longing are the fundamental areas of experience explored in the most poignant and intimate fashion. Montale does not romanticize, but he maintains a deeply satisfying fusion of the experience of love with the moral and political dilemmas of the time. His poetry is attentive to the Zeitgeist, but it is made more human, more sensitive, and more credible by the strength of love that runs through it. The language is spare; the certainties of Europe and his love are threatened by war and adversity. A number of actual women are given Beatrice-like significance in the poems, but the fragmented sense of their actuality and vulnerability illuminates the atmosphere of incipient tragedy. Underlying the poems runs a tone of anger and protest against human destruction.

If Montale’s early life in Liguria, Monterosso, and Genoa had encouraged his introspection and self-absorption, the two decades he passed in Florence fostered his cultural awareness of humanism, literary ideas, and intellectual traditions. He was at this time writing reviews and essays on various literary subjects, and he translated into Italian Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of Dr. Faustus (1604); William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (1592-1593), Julius Caesar (1599-1600), Hamlet (1600-1601), and The Winter’s Tale (1610-1611); and other works. As his literary taste expanded and the range of his cultural appreciation widened, Montale was also producing poetry that was to appear in his third book. Between 1940 and 1942, he produced a sequence published in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1943 entitled “Finisterre.” In 1948, on January 30, an opportune meeting with Guglielmo Emanuel, the editor of the national daily Corriere della sera, resulted in Montale being asked to provide immediately an article on the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, which had just occurred. In two hours, Montale had the piece ready, and it appeared (anonymously) the next day. As a result, Montale was offered a permanent post on the paper, and he moved to Milan.

Montale’s third volume, La bufera e altro (1956; The Storm, and Other Poems , 1978), gathers work written throughout the 1940’s, in which lyrical and autobiographical qualities are mixed with political and historical concerns. He regarded it as his best book, and poems such as “L’anguilla” (“The Eel”) and the “Finisterre” cycle are brilliantly realized. “Primavera hitleriana” (“The Hitler Spring”) is an evocative and sinister depiction of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini meeting in Florence. A sequence of poems sprang from Montale’s visits to England and Scotland, as his attention to his immediate location, in Ely or Glasgow or Edinburgh, is disturbingly haunted by the vision of the woman he loves and his craving to rejoin her. Montale visited the Middle East (with his wife), and as his love poetry deepened and grew in poignancy and poise, his resolute refusal to engage directly in political life was reconfirmed. The book ends with two “provisional conclusions”: “Piccolo testamento”(small testament) and “Il sogno del prigioniero” (the prisoner’s dream), in which Montale’s stoical adherence to spiritual independence rejects all recourse to the securities of either the Roman Catholic Church or communism, the two political regimes then dominant in Italy. The mature restraint in these poems is a register of Montale’s historical as well as his spiritual condition.

Montale’s volume Satura (1971) contains poems previously published as “Xenia” (1964-1967), written on the death of his wife, Drusilla Tanzi, and published in translation in 1970, together with miscellaneous other poems. The elegies are profoundly moving and reminiscent of Thomas Hardy in their hallucinatory power. They were written when Montale was in his seventies. The honorary degree of doctor of letters was awarded to Montale by the Universities of Rome, Milan, and Cambridge. In 1967, he was made a life-senator. The Nobel Prize, awarded in 1975, was a recognition of his life’s achievement in poetry, which, though limited to a handful of books, has been compared to that of Eliot and of Ezra Pound. He died in Milan, an elder statesman of Italian literature, in 1981.

Significance

Throughout his working life, Montale was a professional journalist as well as a major poet. His published criticism includes work on modern Italian, British, and American literature, as well as essays on Dante, Giovanni Boccaccio, and a wide range of others. He published a book of stories, La farfalla di Dinard (1956; Butterfly of Dinard, 1971), and collections of essays and articles have also appeared. His achievement as a critic of literature and music and as a storyteller has added to his stature as a man of letters, but it is as a poet of lyric depth and lonely honesty that his moral and political significance is to be found. No one has written so well of the common ground between solitude and love. Concurrently, Montale’s intellectual experiences brought about a cultured wisdom that tempered the oblique idiosyncrasies of his style. The intensity of Montale’s poetry, its quartzlike beauty, suggests the strength of his character. In contradistinction to Eliot, Montale consistently refused to come to a point of certainty: His conclusions are deliberate and arrived at with difficulty, but if they are tempered, they are always provisional. Throughout a long life spanning both world wars and the Italian experience during the twentieth century, Montale exerted an immense influence on contemporary poets. As a critic and journalist, a senior figure in the Italian literary world, and a very modest man of great skeptical intelligence, he came to be seen as “the poet” of modern Italy.

Bibliography

Brook, Clodagh J. The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: Metaphor, Negation, and Silence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Brook maintains that Montale’s struggle with language is the key element in his work and demonstrates how this struggle informs Montale’s poetry.

Gatt-Rutter, John. “Manichee and Hierophant: Montale’s Negative Epiphany.” In Writers and Politics in Modern Italy. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978. A useful discussion of the poem “Nel silenzio” from Satura (1971) brings out the relation of Montale’s rhetorical devices to the “political structure” of his poetry, determining its “oracular force” as a consequence of its “metaphysical affirmative.”

Huffman, Claire. Montale and the Occasions of Poetry. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. Six interconnected essays offer close discussions of individual poems, drawing on Montale’s essays, interviews, and letters. Much Italian literary criticism of Montale is also made available in this extremely helpful book. Includes copious annotations and an index.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “T. S. Eliot, Eugenio Montale, and Vagaries of Influence.” Comparative Literature 27 (1975): 193-207. A carefully judged comparative study of poetic influence. Montale wrote with great sympathy on Eliot and translated his poetry.

Leavis, F. R. “Xenia.” The Listener (December 16, 1971): 845-846. The great English moralist and critic Leavis appraises Montale’s elegaic poems in this highly astute and sensitive critique.

Praz, M. “Eliot and Montale.” In T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, compiled by Richard March and Tambimuttu. London: Editions Poetry, 1948. An early comparative study of the vision and understanding demonstrated by two of the greatest twentieth century poets.

Singh, G. “Eugenio Montale.” In Italian Studies, edited by E. R. Vincent. Cambridge, England: W. Heffer and Sons, 1962. An essay providing a general overview of Montale’s work and achievement.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Eugenio Montale: A Critical Study of His Poetry, Prose, and Criticism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973. An indispensable, full-scale study of Montale’s work, discussing his biography, literary background, affiliations, and influences, and providing critical analysis of the poems in each of Montale’s books. Contains a bibliography and indexes.