Eugenio Montale 9780231881791

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Eugenio Montale by

GLAUCO CAMBON

(

Columbia

University

NEW YORK & L O N D O N

Press 1972

COLUMBIA ESSAYS ON MODERN WRITERS

is a series of critical studies of English. Continental, and other writers, whose works are of contemporary artistic and intellectual significance. Editor William York Tindall Advisory

Editors

Jacques Barzun

W.T.H. Jackson

Joseph A. Mazzeo

Eugenio Montale is Number 61 of the series G L A U C O CAMBON

is Professor of Romance Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Recent American Poetry, The Inclusive Flame, and, in this series, Giuseppe Ungaretti.

Copyright © 1972 Columbia University Press ISBN: 0-231-03513-6 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-186641 Printed in the United States of America

Eugenio Montale Eugenio Montale has said that life itself will take care of eluding the artist —a pronouncement worthy of Thomas Mann's early persona, Tonio Kröger, whose social background resembles Móntales. We should do injustice to our poet, though, if we were to infer from that pronouncement that his art is irrelevant to the shared, historical experience of human life, or that it reflects sheer bookishness. There is a certain type of alienation which, according to Montale himself, is a guarantee of relevance in our troubled time; this is what he called the necessary "solitude of the artist" —a distance making for perspective. Let us remember then, a few preliminary facts. Born in Genoa on Columbus Day, 1896, Montale spent his boyhood and youth between his native city and the family villa of Monterosso on the southeastern part of the Ligurian Riviera. His well-to-do father, a businessman, enabled him to devote himself to his favorite occupations —reading and singing. And he read avidly —French novelists, English poets, philosophers like Schopenhauer, Bergson, Boutroux, Croce, in addition to the Italian classics. We have this from Montale's own statements in "Intenzioni—intervista immaginaria" (Intentions, an Imaginary Interview), as well as from Nascimbeni's recent biography. World War I interrupted forever Montale's projected career as a baritone; after a few months of training in the fall of 1917, he saw action as an infantry officer on the Trentino front against the Austrians. The experience left its mark on him, as did, shortly after, his exposure to the thickening climate of Fascist dictatorial

ship in the postwar years. He weathered this ordeal as best he could, by concentrating on his integrity as an artist and by keeping in touch with old wartime friends like the writer Sergio Solmi, along with whom, and with the critic Debenedetti, he started a short-lived literary magazine, Primo Tempo, in 1922. He also widened the circle of his literary friendships, and he was the first Italian critic to support the curiously neglected novelist Italo Svevo of Trieste, whose ironical work, La coscienza di Zeno (1923), marked a turning point in Italian fiction and in Montale's life —the two authors became close friends. Another important connection in the world of letters was the liberal writer and editor Piero Gobetti of Turin, in whose pioneering journal, Il Baretti, Montale published in 1925 his statement on literary policy, "Stile e Tradizione" (Style and Tradition), advocating a dynamic, responsible attitude toward tradition and a combination of stylistic sobriety with openness to the new and the "foreign." In the same year Gobetti published Montale's first book of verse, with the characteristically demure (but suggestive) title, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones). Montale's antifascist commitment was quiet but firm, and he entered a kind of "internal exile" in the crucial postwar years. In this, Montale's behavior resembled that of the philosopher Croce rather than that of self-exiled dissenters like Borgese or Silone. While his book was revised and expanded in subsequent editions (1926, 1928), Montale found he could not support himself by literary journalism, and he moved from Genoa to Florence in 1927 to work for a local publisher. Two years later he got a better position as curator of the Vieusseux library, but he refused to apply for membership in the Fascist party, and the times made for increasing official intolerance; his municipal employers fired him in 1938 for political reasons. Meanwhile the literary and artistic milieu of Florence had taken him to its heart, [4]

and the liberal magazine Solaria had provided the forum once supplied by II Baretti. The "Hermetic" poets recognized him as their leader and model (along with Ungaretti), and the publication of his second book of verse, Le Occasioni (The Occasions), in 1939 won heartening acclaim from a wide reading public far beyond the circle of the Giubbe Rosse cafe where the dissenting and creative elite met. The Florentine period (lasting until well after World War II) also marked Montale's first trips abroad, during which he got in touch with other European writers; T. S. Eliot paid him a visit in Florence after publishing Montale's "Arsenio" in The Criterion in 1928. The thirties mattered also in another way. Love came to Montale in two different forms, both of which left their mark on his art: the sudden shock of inspiration from a lovely and learned foreign lady (the "Clizia" of Le Occasioni and La bufera e altro) who soon deserted him but durably changed the man and the artist, and the lifelong devotion of a cherished wife (the protagonist of "Ballata scritta in una clinica" [Ballad Written in a Hospital] and of the later Xenia). The two experiences proved complementary to each other in the context of Montale's poetry, where feminine presence plays an ever rising, unique role. Finisterre, the nucleus of a third book of poetry to come, appeared at Lugano, Switzerland, in 1942, while its author lay low in Florence. The end of the war found him still there, and witnessed a short-lived resurgence of belief in positive political participation, after which Montale lapsed into a personal kind of skepticism. In 1948 he moved from Florence to Milan, where the widespread centrist daily, Il Corriere della Sera, employed him as contributing editor to its literary and musical sections. His regular commitment to journalism occasioned the writing of the short stories, mainly autobiographical, which in 1956 appeared in book form as La farfalla di Dinard (The Butterfly of Dinard). [5]

In the same year, Montale's third major book of verse was published, La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things), incorporating the thin Finisterre collection of 1942 but not the verse translations from several poets, mostly English, which had been collected in 1948 as Quaderno di traduzioni (A Copybook of Translations). And as the years went by, new publications came out: the spare verse of Satura (privately printed in 1962) and Xenia (which commemorated his wife, Drusilla Tanzi, who died in 1963), the miscellaneous essays of Auto da fè (1966), surveying four decades of literary activity, the travelogue pages of Fuori di Casa (Abroad, 1969), the correspondence with Italo Svevo, and the fourth major book of verse, Satura (1971). Further volumes are known to be in the works. From this summary of Montale's life, a certain pattern emerges. If the phases of that pattern, all characterized in turn by a focal work or group of works, seem broadly to correspond to the natural cycles of human life, from youth to old age, against the counterpoint of major historical developments, they also reflect the periods Montale has successively spent in three different regions, or cities, of his native country. Thus Liguria is inextricably connected with the phase of infancy and youth, up to early manhood, after World War I, and it forms the thematic background of the first book, Ossi di seppia; the Florentine period encompasses the mature years of Le Occasioni and Finisterre, of a second world war presaged and weathered, of expanded European consciousness; the Milanese period is definitely the late one, and although it overlaps (artistically speaking) with the second Florentine one (of World War II) because it brings forth La bufera e altro, it mainly has to do with prose and postwar disenchantment. Periodization apart, Cuttlefish Bones is a work of consummate craftsmanship, and the impact it made was also due to the [6]

strength and timeliness of the experience this artistry conveyed. There had been nothing of comparable caliber in Italian poetry since Ungaretti's equally memorable first book, Allegria di naufragi (Mirth of Shipwrecks); and although Ungaretti started on different lines, by iconoclastically reverting to a "primitive" syntax and vocabulary, while Montale clung to the essential structures of metric and linguistic tradition, they shared a profound thoughtfulness, a dislike for official rhetoric, and a consequent predilection for much that in language or theme would have previously been considered unpoetic. Each in his own way obeyed from the start the call of a cognitive Muse, rejecting the seductions of mere ornament — those very seductions which had so often succeeded with the highly gifted, temperamental predecessor of both poets, Gabriele d'Annunzio. There was no place either for superhuman heroism of d'Annunzio's kind in the mythology of Ungaretti and Montale, members of a disabused generation. Rather, the bareness of the human condition was to be their basic theme. This is certainly implied by the self-deflating title of Ossi di seppia. A cuttlefish bone is an inconspicuous object, the dead relic of an equally inconspicuous, if strange, marine creature. It would be found on Montale's native Ligurian beaches, which form such a persistent background to the poems in the book. And by one of the sea-changes poetry warrants, this Godforsaken thing loses its insignificance to become (as does also the pebble) a symbol of essentialness, the goal of the poet's yearning for a deliverance from his flesh-burdened individuality and for a nirvanic identification with mineral and vegetal Nature: Oh then tossed around like the cuttlefish bone by the waves, little by little to vanish; [7]

to become a wrinkled tree trunk or a pebble polished by the sea; into the sunset colors to effuse myself; to disappear as flesh and then gush up as a sun-wild spring, devoured by the sun . . . That comes from the third stanza of "Riviere" (Shores), an early piece dated 1920 but placed by the author at the very end of the book, as if to counteract by compositional symbolism the funereal import of later poems like "Arsenio" (which was written six or seven years later, and added to the 1928 edition). For "Shores" (like many other poems in Cuttlefish Bones) recalls the bygone ecstasy of childhood in the presence of the sea and of the beautiful if rugged land, and though "atrocious" memories have intervened (presumably the experience of war), a new sense of life seems to swell the persona's veins, the hope of a "new blossoming" which will heal the rift in the soul and "convert elegy into a hymn." With a similar type of rearrangement, Montale shifted to an intermediate position in the "Motets" series (in Le Occasioni) its chronologically last piece, to put in its place an earlier one that seals the sequence on a note of acceptance rather than black despair. Since Cuttlefish Bones has the loose structure a book of lyrics may claim, putting "Shores" last in defiance of chronology clearly shows the author's intention to stress the theme of actual or desired rebirth as an antiphon to the theme of paralysis or death-in-life that haunts the book, culminating in "Arsenio" or in such Schopenhauerian pieces as "Il male di vivere" (The Pain of Living). Empathy and detachment, cosmic effusion and alienation, surging life force and deathly dryness alternate or intertwine in the whole cycle of Cuttlefish Bones to mark the vicissitudes of a poetical self engaged in the relentless quest for its own meaning through a confrontation with the elements; and it is now mineral, now vegetal or animal existence that seems to pro[8]

vide its fittest imaginative counterparts. The rhythmic embodiment of such a pulsing vision has correspondingly expansive and contracted patterns (the "Ossi brevi" or Brief [Cuttlefish] Bones of which Silvio Ramat is particularly fond in preference to the long, effusive pieces like "Shores" and "Mediterraneo"). We may prefer one or the other rhythmic form, with the linguistic consequences it entails, but they are both intrinsic to the inner dynamism of Montale's poetry, of which they constitute the systole and diastole throughout. Nothing could possibly be more shrunk than the cuttlefish bone, a real systole of imagery, yet it carries with it the rich aura of marine suggestiveness — the utter expansiveness of the sea from which it came —and this is one reason why Montale chose it as the title symbol for the central sequence of this book, as well as for the book in its entirety. The image has the connotation of aridity which permeates the book's vistas, and of remembered life and happiness. It is germane to Eliot's "prayer of the bone on the beach," to Yeats's "bone upon the shore," and to Ungaretti's stone imagery; in fact, in the passage from "Shores" quoted above, it is hard not to think of Ungaretti's lines in "I Fiumi" (The Rivers): "The Isonzo flowing/ polished m e / like a pebble of its own," when the cuttlefish bone leads by imaginative association to the desired metamorphosis of the persona into a "pebble/ polished by the sea." The same motif recurs in the opening lines of poem No. 7 in the "Mediterraneo" series : I would have wanted to feel rugged and essential just like the pebbles which you turn over salt-eaten; a splinter outside time, the witness to a cold will that does not pass away. But the wish for elemental simplicity and endurance, like the complementary wish to dissolve into the boundless, unthinking life of the cosmos, repeatedly clashes with the realization of a [9]

precarious, divided, limited self, beset with its ineptitude for action to the point (see "Arsenio") of paralysis. The challenge of nature makes the self recognize its own separation from it, along with the need to return to that vast, permanent, ever elusive source which has cast man out —like a cuttlefish bone. Yet there are moments when the Montalian persona can feel himself to be a part of nature, by accepting his own transitoriness as a selfconsuming process within the universal seething of the elements: . . . I am nothing but a spark from a thyrsus. I know it well: to bum, this, and no other, is my significance. That Dionysian conclusion of the "Mediterraneo" cycle is, to be sure, provisional within the unfolding of Montale's restless search for an existential truth, and it should be read against the antiphonal conclusion in "Arsenio" of a deathly "delirium of immobility" in an "icy crowd of dead people"; but it is a valid dialectical phase of his imaginative experience, not to be ignored or expunged if we want to understand Montale's poetical development more fully. The Mediterranean is many things to our poet: his native Ligurian sea, connected with childhood memories (poem No. 2), the sea as primordial element, the sea as godhead and mentor, and the sea as the numinous, infinite matrix of life against which one's own finitude can be tested or, alternatively, overcome: And your roaring grows, and azure the new shadow expands. My thoughts abandon me utterly. I have no senses left; or sense. I have no limit. This extreme diastole of the self, which for a moment feels identified with the concrete infinity of the sea, is an ecstasy, a selfannihilation of consciousness, and comes at the end of the penultimate poem in the series, to mark the accomplishment of a [10]

purification that has taken place through the long rhythmic waves of these poems. The Dionysian surrender of separate consciousness recurs, in final position, at the end of the last poem in the series, as we saw; and although these moments may be reminiscent of d'Annunzio, a poet from whom Montale had every reason to differentiate himself even while learning something from him, the total context is not. If "Mediterraneo" climaxes in a Dionysian statement, Montale's poetry as a whole is anything but Dionysian, for it keeps harping on the theme of finite, conscious, time-threatened existence; and in "Mediterraneo" itself the surrender to the cosmic source which will obliterate the pain of existing as separate consciousness comes only as the culmination of a variously reiterated confession of impotence or indecisiveness. Accordingly, the language rises to its Dionysian pitch only after ranging a gamut of realist, ironic, and elegiac tones which form the prevalent register of Montale's astringent style. In a way, this whole series represents his supreme endeavor to "convert elegy into a hymn," for elegy will remain his constant mode thereafter, as the reader of the following volume, Le Occasioni, well knows. And while the syntax structures itself in ample units, to strengthen the wavelike effect of regular or relaxed hendecasyllables and longer, hexameterlike lines alternating with shorter lines of seven or eight syllables, the diction remains clear-cut, achieving sharp pictorial effects. Who can forget the two darting bluejays etched in flight ("frecciate biancazzurre, due ghiandaie") that seal with their felicity the first piece of the series? Or the joyful plover ("spersa pavoncella") that rushes from a secluded glen to the beach (end of poem No. 3)? One notices the more closely descriptive bent of the first poems, which set the scene for the persona's self-searching conversation with the sea, eventually to make room for the more philosophical lan-

[11]

guage of the last pieces; one likewise notices how the first four pieces focus scenically on the land and the beach, as if to indicate a homecoming to the sea, while the four last pieces keep the visual focus on the sea as such, with which (or Whom) the persona merges at the end. It also pays to observe how the poet progressively builds up the naked element into a demonic-divine interlocutor. The sea is naturalistically denoted in the third person in poem No. 1, but already poem No. 2 addresses it as a mythic Thou with a lesson to impart, and from poem No. 4 on, the vocative is reinforced by the appellation "Father." Perhaps this goes against Jungian tenets about archetypes, though I do not think it goes against basic Jungian insights. Poets like Whitman (who personifies the ocean as "fierce old mother" in Sea-Drift) in analogous imaginative situations could not help choosing the archetypally more appropriate maternal personification because their languages either used the feminine gender for the sea or (as is the case of English) could go back to a Germanic source where grammar equally makes it feminine. But Montale works in a language that assigns the masculine gender to the word for "sea" (mare), and so the process of mythic personification was already oriented by language ("grammar") on the paternal choice. Yet this is not all. There are masculine precedents for mythic personifications of the sea: Neptune-Poseidon, and above all Proteus, the sleight-of-hand demon who eludes questioning man by continual metamorphoses (Odyssey, Book IV). Now let us consider the beginning of poem No. 2 in "Mediterraneo," where mythic personification starts: O Ancient One, I am inebriated by the voice which issues from your mouths when they gape like green bells and then rush back and are dissolved. [12]

The mythic spell is already cast by that initial vocative, "O Ancient One" ("Antico"), which evokes a living presence; it also happens to be the epithet Menelaus gives to Proteus in the Odyssey when he wrests from the minor sea-god the revelation of what befell his brother and his comrades-in-arms after the departure from Troy. The truly protean nature of the sea (which inspired the Greek myth to begin with) comes through again in Montale's verse, without any explicit reliance on the Homeric narrative after that canny initial cue. The attribution of a "voice" to the "Ancient One" reinforces the personification and makes it anthropomorphic, but the following line dissolves that effect to insinuate on us the demonic figure that remains unseizable through its ever-changing shapes: the voice issues from many "mouths," and these in turn become "green bells" and vanish again. The revelation the Montalian persona obtains from his protean interlocutor is not a story of narrative import but the realization of a cosmic law—constancy through change—which the sea embodies and thus imparts by daily example to its bewildered human contemplator: You first told me that the small ferment of my heart was but a moment of yours; that at the roots of my being was your hazardous law: to be vast and diverse and yet steady: and thus to rid myself of any filth as you do who cast out on the shore among cork seaweed and starfish the useless waste of your abyss. This difficult law —the law of ceaselessly developing life—the persona no longer finds it possible to follow, though he tries. Unlike his Homeric counterpart, he is overwhelmed by his Proteus; he actually "becomes stone" in the presence of the sea, and later [13]

on in the series (No. 5) he metaphorically identifies with the stony slope dropping to the sea and with the thirsty plant that grows from it; in Montale's animism, even stone suffers, and this, too, anticipates the "delirium of immobility" in which the Arsenio persona will be caught, though in the course of the "Mediterraneo" series the outcome will be otherwise, as we saw. Even when he draws on the store of traditional myths for his own poetical purposes, Montale never does it extrinsically, but rather rehearses the genesis of myth through his linguistic experience, as Whitman and Dickinson did. He is, in other words, a mythopoeic rather than a mythological poet. But this means that, especially in the "Mediterraneo" poems, he is going back to the source of poetry itself, and thus we are not surprised to find that at a certain point here he explicitly talks of his problem as an artist: to match in his verbal medium the matchless power of the inspiring element. A problem he confesses himself incapable of solving; the "voice that love dictates" is dimmed, and he only has the "stale letters of dictionaries" to express the original rapture. So if the persona's quest for valid expression fails, his quest for a purifying source, for innocence, succeeds: "the exile re-entered his incorrupt country." In "Mediterraneo" the poet has taken stock of himself and signally succeeded in creating a rich verbal, rhythmic, and thematic orchestration that marks his intense spiritual youth and leads us to much that had anticipated it as well as to much that, in changed register, was to follow. One theme that "Mediterraneo" shares with much of Montale's other work in Cuttlefish Bones and in the later books is the situation of the persona standing on the shore, between dry land and open sea. This is already to be found in the earliest poem of Cuttlefish Bones (dated 1916), "Meriggiare pallido e assorto" (To Spend the Noon in Pale Absorption), where the familiar Ligurian seascape appears to the contemplator in a harsh light, [14]

and every sound from the surrounding hills is dry; the very syllables crackle with plosive alliterations, and the concluding image, drawn from the locally ubiquitous garden wall topped with defensive bottle shards, becomes a symbol of life's ineluctability. Montale loves his beautiful native Riviera, but can see it as a kind of wasteland. We find again the persona looking out to sea—without yielding to its invitation—in "Falsetto," an exquisite madrigal that is part of the first section ("Movimenti") of Cuttlefish Bones. Here the persona, "of the kind that stays back on dry land," addresses a lovely girl by the homely name of Esterina, who seems to possess all the qualities he vainly desires for himself in "Mediterraneo": she is untroubled by her future, she is elementally strong and handsome like "a seaweed, a pebble," and vital like a lizard, and she joyfully and daringly plunges into "the arms of [her] divine friend" the sea—being somewhat divine herself, since she reminds the poet of Diana the virgin archer; in fact, she appears to him "as a marine creature/ who is untainted by the brine/ and returns purer to the shore." Apart from the effective imagery, which reaches a cameolike neatness in the climactic portrayal of the girl walking on the springboard to dive into the seething surf while her profile "is carved/ against a pearl background," the secret of this poem lies in its undulant, resilient rhythm (akin to the "Mediterraneo" pattern) combined with a diction that effortlessly unites the colloquial and the courtly. The total result is that unique Montalian tone, low-keyed but nimbly modulated, which has penetrated the modern sensibility, in Italy at least, to an irrevocable extent. One clue to that secret can be found in "I limoni" (The Lemons), the first piece of the same first section to which "Falsetto" too belongs. It opens on a polemical note against the "poets laureate" who can only think of literary, precious plants for a scenery, while the persona proclaims his liking for homely botany [15]

and common scenes (and speech); thus he will raise the humble but heartening lemon tree to poetical dignity in defiance of extant clichés. To understand this poem, it is well to remember that for Ligurian Montale a lemon tree is as common as lettuce, and to dissociate his attitude from the romantic spirit of Goethe's Mignon song; the "land where lemons grow" was, to Mignon's creator, exotically attractive, and in fact his famous poem places lemons in the company of myrtles and laurels to define the Gestalt of a mythic Italy which is one and the same thing with the classical South for the northern writer. Now the poetics of the demure, of the quotidian and antiliterary, was no novelty in the Italy of the early twenties, when Montale worked at his first book; it had found noticeable sponsors in the so-called Crepuscolari or "Twilight" poets of the previous two decades, to one of whom, Guido Gozzano, Montale has acknowledged a particular debt. This type of poetics (allied to Laforguian irony) had proved a healthy antidote against the highfalutin style of Carducci and d'Annunzio, whose impact had been tremendous in spite of their insufficient self-criticism. Yet it would be wrong to infer an unswerving loyalty to colloquial speech and unliterary topics on Montale's part, for that would fail to account for the delicate balance a poem like "Falsetto" (among others) strikes between the low and the high style. The classical references and courtly words in that poem take on a fresh quality precisely because they no longer monopolize the style. Having relaxed vocabulary and meter, Montale could afford to use whatever elements of the illustrious tradition seemed available; and here no programs, no formulas as such, but only his acute ear could help him. Montale has always hated literary academicism, yet he is one of the most "literary" poets of our time —the way Eliot, Valéry, and Stevens have been. Conversely, his choice of a prevalently conversational mode has never slipped into chattiness, nor has it precluded cer[16]

tain climactic soarings which take one by surprise even if they prove only too natural in a poet who has confessed his yearning to move from "elegy" to "hymn." The conclusion of "The Lemons" is a case in point, with its onrushing "song" of "sunlight's golden bugles," and even more so is the often quoted sunflower poem, to which I shall revert, in the "Cuttlefish Bones" section of Cuttlefish Bones, or, for that matter, many a poem of the "Mediterraneo" section. By lowering his basic tone without renouncing an occasional high register, Montale has reserved the possibility of more varied effects; he has, in short, widened his tonal space. The frequent use of musical metaphors to describe his craft may be justified by his addiction to music, especially opera. More than his explicitly musical titles in the first section of Cuttlefish Bones ("English Horn," "Falsetto"), I have here in mind the rich, mellow play on long vowels. "English Horn," by the way, is the only piece salvaged from a sequence of five, each named after a musical instrument; generally speaking, such prunings, or smaller ones within one poem, have occurred elsewhere in the book after the first edition. Montale is a craftsman who often earns his effects of ease by careful work. And here a careful consideration imposes itself. The very poet who has inherited and developed Gozzano's conversational bent, to tone down whatever effusions might prove dangerous to authentic utterance, is the poet who can sing —albeit in recoil from obvious melody, as his predilection for irregular stanzas, abnormal lines, and off-rhymes demonstrates. Recitativo is his forte, but he knows what to do with arias, too. All of this has already occasioned some reference, by way of anticipation, to that central section which gives its title to the whole book and immediately precedes "Mediterraneo." These two sections, along with the following one, "Meriggi e Ombre" (Noons and Shadows), may be said to constitute the backbone of [17]

the volume. In many ways "Cuttlefish Bones" is antiphonal to "Movements" and even more to "Mediterraneo." "Mediterraneo" is a symphony orchestra; "Cuttlefish Bones" is chamber music, a series of rather short and monodie compositions. "Mediterraneo" celebrates the myths of the sea, "Cuttlefish Bones" is the rhapsody of aridity. At the very outset we find a polemical statement on poetics which, like the later "Arsenio," seems to imply a sharp refusal of the contemporary world and thus acquires an indirect political import —though politics and history as such are conspicuously absent from the whole book : "Do not ask of us the word that will square off from every side/ our shapeless soul. . ./ Do not ask of us the formula that may open up worlds for you,/ but just some crooked syllable, as dry as a withered branch./ This, and this only, can we tell you today,/ what we are not, what we do not want." The negations are underscored by the poet, not by me. This is the Montale that comes closest to Eliot's wasteland climate; except that he can find strange solace in the very triumph of the merciless sunlight which devours everything. The "pain of living" so often observed—in the crumpling leaf, in the strangled brook, in the fallen horse—is offset by the prodigy of "Divine Indifference" : the statue in the drowsiness of noon, the sailing cloud, the high soaring hawk (poem No. 7). In another poem (No. 3 of the section), "our burnt out souls/ . . ./ are lost in the serenity/ of a certitude: light." Still another poem (No. 11) starts on the note of "the glory of outspread noon" which consumes the very stones; and the nirvana bestowed by high noon finds its acme in poem No. 6, where the persona asks an unspecified interlocutor to bring him the sunflower, that he may transplant it in his own "salt-burned grounds." This plant epitomizes the tendency of "dark things" to clarity; "bodies spend themselves in a flow/ of colors; these, in music. To vanish/ [18]

is then the supreme bliss"; and a kind of sublimated Dionysian note appears at the end, with the "sunflower maddened by the light." If in "Mediterraneo" the final yearning of the persona is to burn and realize that this is his meaning, and thus to lose himself in infinity, here the accent is more openly nirvanic or nihilist. Buddhist-inspired Schopenhauer lurks behind these and other poems, and a Zen-like note rings out when the longed-for deliverance from the pain-ridden world of maya leads our poet to hypostatize the word "ignorance" (poems Nos. 8 and 16). But this, no less than the related Dionysian aspect in "Mediterraneo," counts only as a phase in Móntales ceaseless quest for meaning; "the mind investigates, harmonizes, disjoins," as "The Lemons" has it. And no matter how intensely the wish for nirvanic self-annihilation may be expressed in this first book, it is abundantly offset by the imagery of vegetal rootedness which forms a persistent strain through Montale's work, as "Tramontana" (North Wind) and "Scirocco" (South Wind) in the series "L'agave sullo scoglio" (The Agave on the Cliff) show. The persona repeatedly identifies with a plant stubbornly clinging to its rocky soil; or else the human community as such, or one human group, will be metaphorized as a "bush" or (in La bufera e altro) as "the human wood." In a letter to his older friend Svevo, written in the early twenties, Montale spoke of himself as a plant burned by the wind. His world, especially in "Cuttlefish Bones," tends to take shape as a hopelessly stony one, and at times it threatens to crack or crumble, as some apocalyptic utterances put it; more generally, it is undermined by entropy, the ceaseless consumption of all. In this irremediable situation, the self stoically holds out, in a losing battle against time. But identity will not be renounced, as Dora Markus has it in Le Occasioni; and to know, to exercise consciousness, is what counts. The over-all climate of Cuttlefish [19]

Bones, however, is far from monotonously somber, and even in the homonymous section I have been discussing, sudden awakenings of vitality, glimpses of happiness, stir the deep waters of melancholy. More importantly, the mood of each poem precipitates an image of sharp outlines, often taken from common experience: thus the crying of the child who sees his balloon fly away between the roofs, or the stagnant resignation of the doomed heart which will be occasionally broken by a startle, such as . . . at times resounds, in the silence of the countryside, a rifle shot.

The etching-like quality of Móntales style, his observant eye and intent ear, the reliance on sharp consonantal echoes to offset the bel canto vein of the Italian language, and the dramatic bent of his "Thou" poems are all components of a Dantesque affinity which I believe I was the first to stress, and which is sometimes manifested by intentional cues or motifs. The poet himself has since admitted to his admiration of Dante over other poets, and has even intimated a vague structural analogy between the three canticles of the Divine Comedy and his first three books of verse. But of course his ability to narrow his focus to the small object or the minimal event that condenses a pervasive meaning is his distinctive mark, and in general it must be said that his originality is borne out by the ease with which he has learned from a number of contemporary or ancient poets (especially in his native language) without thereby succumbing to eclecticism. Camillo Sbarbaro, the fellow Ligurian to whom a short section of Cuttlefish Bones is dedicated, certainly preceded him in the delineation of hard, sun-smitten Riviera landscapes, and Guido Gozzano taught him to relax his phrase and notice the small things, while Pascoli helped him to cull significant voices and colors from the world of wildlife (especially birds) [20]

and agriculture, and d'Annunzio provided an example for the sustained cosmic effusion; yet Montale's voice emerges as quite his own from all those assimilations. For all its austerity, which at times could be termed Leopardian, Cuttlefish Bones is a rich, varied book, where grace and happiness are not wanting. The poems telling of "the end of childhood" are part of it, and their special merit is that they evoke the charm of lost innocence in the very act of mourning the loss. "Arsenio" and "Delta," among the latest additions, mark the transition to the second cycle of Montale's poetry: the persona of Arsenio (notice the rhyme play on the poet's first name) is a thoroughly disenchanted one, registering the ambience with hypersensitive meticulousness, and facing his own impotence. "Delta" combines several traits of the most typical Montale : the sharply rendered scene (down to the "sulphur glare" that lights the horizon while the "towboat comes to dock in the bay"), the dialogue with an absent and (here) unspecifiable person, the interpénétration of subjective depth and objective reality in what he himself has defined as a "metaphysical" kind of poetics, and the stark sense of stoic deprivation. Both poems (and several others in the last part of the book) are thematically based on the situation of the persona between the world of land and the world of water. In "Chrysalis," another poem of the same section ("Meriggi e Ombre" [Noons and Shadows]), the persona again faces the openness of the sea from a landlocked situation, and talks to an unspecified Thou to summon a dead past and a possible future. The fact that the indeterminate addressee of this difficult poem should be an actress Montale vaguely knew does not matter; what matters is the excruciating dilemma of necessity and freedom that it formulates: and perhaps everything is written down and fixed, and we shall walk on without dislodging a single stone of the huge wall, [21]

and we shall not see on our way freedom, miracle, arise, the fact unshackled by necessity! This ethical and metaphysical anguish is at the center of Montale's interests, and in varied form it recurs throughout his verse. It seems proper to add that here our poet shows he has read Emile Boutroux, the philosopher of "contingency," just as the nirvanic yearnings of other poems in his first book bore the mark of Schopenhauer; but I would not go so far as to call him a philosophical poet. He never writes to illustrate a philosophy, but appropriates (or «»incidentally utters) certain basic issues of thought which to him are experiential rather than abstract. Thus the frightening likelihood of an impassable barrier to the yearning for liberty—the fear that the world may really be a soulless machine, a prison with no escape—nurtures the constant alertness to signs of a different order, undemonstrable yet momently tangible: the epiphanies of freedom, of meaning. In "Delta," with a characteristically firmer, clipped style, an earlier cue from "Mediterraneo" releases a sudden vision of that transcendent order, which is tied to a mysterious feminine presence, a memory surfacing from who knows what layers of existence, perhaps from the prenatal phase; and the only thing the persona knows about her is a sustaining "mute message," otherwise he cannot even decide whether she is a real "shape" or a delusion rising like mist from the roiling river mouth. And this introduces us to the atmosphere of Le Occasioni, Montale's second book. It includes poems dating from the very years (1926-27) when these last additions to Cuttlefish Bones took shape, and it is definitely more "hermetic," if tonally less various, than its predecessor. One thing that sets it apart is the prevalence of the feminine myth, joining the erotic and the metaphysical spheres in such a way as to recall the thirteenth[22]

century Dolce Stil Novo poets along with Dante. This has prompted Silvio Ramat to call it a book of love poetry, though he certainly did not mean this to the exclusion of the other thematic strains which contribute to the strength of The Occasions : ethical, political, historical. For The Occasions is instinct with a closer historical awareness than Cuttlefish Bones; the earlier book has its focus on an unhistorically conceived nature, and it is tied to Montale's native Liguria, a mythic landscape which contains his childhood, the lost golden age. Lost—yet not so lost, yet not so distant across the gap opened by the war experience that it cannot rise again to nourish the imagination with its imperishable light. Cuttlefish Bones is the book of ripe youth, already tried but not yet utterly cut off from its innocent source, and still stirred by creative turbulence; it is the book of summer and noon. The Occasions is the book of maturity, with autumnal, even wintry inklings; and though it sometimes reverts to the ancestral Ligurian scene, other landscapes mostly color its pages, whether Tuscan or Austrian, French and English: it registers the Wanderjahre of its author. If the inclusion of poems like "Delta" or Arsenio" in Cuttlefish Bones, and the imaginative return to Liguria (in pieces like "Vecchi Versi" [Old Verses]) in The Occasions, provide a transition from the first to the second book, there is no mistaking the changed atmosphere of the latter. The diction is sparer; narrative transitions are down to a minimum, elliptical leaps abound, and innuendo triumphs over description. Colors are less vivid, attuned mostly to a wintry gray (in fact, a quote from a Shakespearian sonnet on winter prefaces the fourth and last section). Introversion has superseded effusion, "elegy" dominates, with no trace of "hymn" whatsoever. The persona lives in a refractory, impervious world, which he keeps scanning for signs. This is already evident from the over-all approach of the intro[23]

ductory piece, "Vecchi Versi"(01d Verses), dated 1926 and thus coeval to the last additions to Cuttlefish Bones. It ostensibly tells a story — the memory of a family evening in the Monterosso villa—with abundance of detail. But the minutely described scene centers on one apparently insignificant event —the entrance of a large night moth —which, retrospectively, takes on the meaning of an omen; and although the poet leaves the omen undeciphered, the historically aware reader can do his own deciphering. The hideousness of the (however harmless) moth that carries a death's-head pattern on its back makes it a mute revelation of the bad times to come: the war, then Fascist dictatorship and its repressive policies are implied here as a manifestation of the death principle. But the poet is not trying to construct a punctilious allegory; he is just trying to telescope history, a whole sum of dire events, into one instantaneous flash. It is a kind of retroactive prophecy emerging from the creative process of memory, which elaborates everything in its subterranean way to unfold its secret meaning—as the conclusion of the poem makes clear. Paradoxically, then, one could speak of "memory as prophecy" — and the whole book, constellated with omens and countervailing redemptive signs, is both prophetic and reminiscent. I hasten to add that memory here is of the Bergsonian, dynamic kind, one and the same thing with the power of mind, while prophecy is meant to denote not so much the ability to predict the future as the skill to interpret the times. The Occasions is among other things a book of time, while Cuttlefish Bones was in a way a book of space. The title itself alerts us to the generally drier, more intellectual nature of the new book; it is a philosophical concept, rather than a specific object like "cuttlefish bones." Any object, person, or event can be an "occasion" of illuminating recognition, the cue that awakens consciousness to unsuspected deep meanings. [24]

Throughout his rhapsody, the poet seeks to connect these flashes of revelation, his one thread being (see "Motet" No. 15) the transcendental figure of the absent lady, who is at the same time very real, flesh and blood. Were he a Dante, sustained by shared faith, the connection would succeed, eventually resulting in a systematic revelation like the Paradiso. But Montale, committed though he may be to his own spiritual values, has no dogmatic or consensual support for them, nor does he have it in his power to formulate them with the philosophical coherence that generations of Schoolmen had bequeathed to his great Florentine ancestor. He keeps searching reality, and the recesses of his mind, for an answer to the pressing problems of the age (mankind hopelessly reeling down the road to barbarism and destruction) and of always (the ceaseless consumption of all things, the irreversible entropy, in the absence of metaphysical guarantees that this destruction will be compensated in an order of permanent meaning). The answer comes fragmentarily, discontinuously, from the "occasions" of contingency, in intuitional flashes he cannot reduce to rational consistence; he is overwhelmed by these fragments of private revelation, and he realizes that they are tangential at best to the opaque world they fail to enlighten durably. As a consequence, the poet is caught between two incommensurable levels of experience: the public, "real," tangible level, where values are forgotten, denied, or falsified, and the private, intangible, metahistorical level, which cannot be shared even though its natural destination is the human community. It is the latter level that can help us to make sense of the former, since authentic values can by now shine forth only privately, in the privileged moment; but the public world refuses to listen, is impervious to such values, and accordingly takes on a clearly infernal aspect (as "Buffalo," or "Il ritorno," or "Motets" No. 1 [25]

and No. 5 will show), while the redemptive force revealed to the poet seems powerless in the face of bestiality:(see "Eastbourne"). Thus the situation of the Montalian persona is tragic, and paradoxically modern by reason of its very anachronism. Imperfectly known except by the (Pascalian) heart, and hard or impossible to demonstrate, those values he keeps looking for through the good offices of his newfangled Beatrice (the Clizia, or Sunflower lady of O vidian ancestry) are not of our time —perhaps not even of this world, though some poems may intimate otherwise (notably "Boats on the Marne"). His is a tragic quest, then, uncrowned by that return to a formally defined ancestral faith, which was Eliot's lot. He is also unblessed with Yeats's faith in a personally constructed esoteric doctrine, though he shares with both poets an apocalyptic bent, a Dantesque affinity, and a predilection for sober style. So far I have resorted to "contingentist" thinkers like Boutroux and Bergson to provide a plausible analogy for Montale's cognitive poetics (the more so as he himself has indicated them as sources); but at this point I find it useful to bring Immanuel Kant's name into the picture. Kant's distinction of the realm of thought into the two incommensurable fields of phenomena and noumena (accepted also by one of Móntales philosophical favorites, Schopenhauer) corresponds fairly well to the epistemologica! polarity that tenses the sinews of Montale's Occasioni poetry. In Kant's system, the phenomenal is physical, sensorially accessible, and measurable, therefore exactly knowable, while the noumenal, springing from deep-seated needs of the human mind that no amount of scientific knowledge will satisfy, has to do with unverifiable absolutes like immortality, Godhead, and the metaphysical existence of the world. More relevantly, the noumena (or objects of pure thought, in Greek) belong to the realm of freedom and infinity. They cannot be proven or dis[26]

proven by analytical reason, but man lives by them insofar as he has a moral existence. And although Kant's Critique of Pure Reason destroyed the traditional metaphysics by sharply limiting the legitimate boundaries of knowledge to what was perceptible and measurable, he also posited a "thing in itself" which underlay phenomena though it could not be reached by our intellectual categories. Precisely because Kant refuses to dogmatize about the unknowable objects of the old metaphysics, but posits them in Pascalian fashion as postulates of "practical" (=ethical) reason, showing that man does not live by bread or science alone, he can help us to understand the difficult poetical enterprise of Montale in The Occasions. When, in "Motet" No. 6, the Italian poet asks himself whether the present "screen of images" which "blocks off" any sense of his Beloved is the domain of death or harbors a faint glimmer of her; when again, in "Motet" No. 9, he reviews a number of physical "occasions" to conclude that She is inaccessibly other; when he then invokes her presence as a bolt of lightning which would put an end to everything, he is clearly personifying the noumenal sphere and trying to catch its chance reverberations in the world of phenomena. We are reminded of his anguished exclamation in "Chrysalis." We also realize that he is bridging the two incommensurable spheres in the act of poetical perception, even while he proclaims their incommensurability—a fact placed by Kant at the basis of artistic experience in his Critique of Judgment. Yet, just as one must be wary of simplifying Móntales affinity for Dante into a matter of imitative dependence, one is well advised to avoid confusing this comparison of Montalian and Kantian epistemology with a possible "discovery" of the poet's doctrinal subservience to the German philosopher. Montale certainly knows his Kant, along with his Schopenhauer and his Boutroux (or his Heidegger), but whatever has contributed to [27]

the creative process is transcended in it, and in the same way that it took Dante's unique genius to transform Aquinas' ideas into poetry, nobody but Montale could have used the ideological suggestions of various modern thinkers to shape his personal vision —a vision variously embodied in sustained elegies like "Eastbourne," "Boats on the Marne," and "News from the Amiata," or in quick, nimble epigrams like the "Motets" or "To Liuba," whose lightness of touch is itself a miracle. Like the true poet he is, Montale thinks in personal, concrete, not abstract terms, intellectually oriented though he may be. Thus we see the rare spectacle of a critically exacting mind that evolves apocalyptic myths of its own. In "Stanze," for example, he transfigures his lady into an angelic power, incarnate but transcendent, that comes to shake the stagnant world, and in "Nuove Stanze" he makes her the clairvoyant opposer of the present political evils — the whole imaginative situation growing from a chess game. In "Eastbourne" the Montalian persona, idling on the seashore during an English Bank Holiday, takes in the peaceful scene, still realizing it is only a parenthesis in the inevitable downhill course of Europe; the omens are there, maimed soldiers from the last war, the sea wipes out the horses' hoofprints on the sand, as if to threaten also the pavilion on the beach from where the ceremonial bugles intone the (here, alarmed) hymn, "God Save the King." Light beams from revolving hotel doors pierce the eyes, to evoke a "carousel" that carries everything away. From the depths of his own being the poet's persona hears the voice of his savior lady, and addresses her in desperate earnest; it seems that not even She will be able to avert the impending catastrophe: Everything will be apparently in vain: even the force which in its tenacious matrix holds together the quick and the dead, the trees and cliffs, [28]

and emanates from you, through you. The feast has no pity. The music band repeats its blares, in the first dark an unarmed goodness is deployed. Evil conquers. . . . The wheel will never stop.

The cues of contingent reality are eloquent (note the revolving doors, and the karma wheel they suggest), and the personal revelation is of a historical, yet timeless drama, the battle of darkness and light, of goodness and evil, which is about to be reenacted in the late thirties. The absent lady, Clizia, emerges as the source of whatever positive, creative force holds the world together; not a strange hypostasis if we think that she personifies the force of love, forever fighting hatred. The myth has Manichaean ancestry, and beyond that it recalls Empedocles' ideas; yet it springs essentially from Montale's own imaginative experience. Clizia's name comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Clytia was a girl changed into a sunflower out of sheer unrequited love for the sun-god; in the modern poet's career one might say she is a sunflower changed into a woman, since the sunflower in Cuttlefish Bones, while radiating the aura that makes for mythical transfiguration, is still not personified; it remained for Montale's rapport with a visiting American lady in the thirties to bring about a personification of the sunflower into the contemplative worshiper and champion of light, who herself becomes, in a few poems of The Occasions and The Storm, a solar goddess. No wonder that she should attract to herself, in a process of imaginative gravitation, the values and meanings for which our poet stands in the dire times of trouble, to the point of becoming the incarnate principle of goodness and justice in a benighted world. And the rewarding experience of reading The Occasions is enriched by recognition of how versatile the angelic lady can be in her poetical avatars; for from poem to poem she [29]

runs all the gamut from individual woman in flesh and blood to birdlike angel, Platonic Idea, or unseizable goddess. This is particularly evident in the "Mottetti" (Motets), the series of short lyrics I have already mentioned more than once. Twenty in all (without counting one that has been removed to the position of epigraph to the whole book), they were composed between 1934 and 1939, but the author rearranged their sequential order in the book without too much regard for chronology (albeit keeping first the three pieces from 1934, the earliest, which happen to contain most if not all of the biographical references that show the factual basis of the love story, or stories, told by the poems). Here the several strains and motifs of Móntales art intertwine or merge, in the unmistakable fire of passion. An intellectual passion, yet rooted in live blood: The footstep that comes so light from the hothouse, is not muffled by the snow, it still is your life, your blood within my veins

(from No. 8)

Poetical imagination raises its object to the level of a Platonic hypostasis, with a boldness well known to great literary lovers, but one sees how this springs from the natural hyperbole of Eros' language. The beloved lady is a Muse, an angel, a bringer of peace, and a restless arouser of the mind; she mediates to her faithful worshiper a higher, dolorous knowledge in defiance of the dark times, she torments him with her absence, but appears to him unexpectedly in a thousand guises —she inhabits his mind; at one point she is a person localized in time and space, but then she is a kind of pervasive essence, an angelic presence, a visitor from other worlds. She is more real to the poet's persona than dull circumambient reality because she challenges that reality; she has physical and psychological, as well as metaphysical, status. [30]

What we see in the "Motets" (and the title alludes both to the exalted, almost sacred quality of the poems and to their inner antiphonal structure) is the poetical development of a very personal experience which seems to release the innermost powers of the self. This is the way poetry is engendered; the personal history forming the theme becomes the genesis of poetry itself. The lightness of touch admirably counterpoints the depth, now searing now joyful, of the theme; these poems are first and foremost, for all their historical and metaphysical overtones, exquisite love lyrics. The writer's consummate craft shows in the firm yet pliable style, which proves germane to all the relevant tones: despair, tenderness, joy, self-reproach, grief, meditation, ecstasy, bereavement, resignation. The Dantesque incisiveness of the first poem feeds on grittily modern images and linguistic choices; the scene is etched visually, auditorily, and tactilely, the Genoa harbor rises before us, it's here and now, and everything focuses on the hell of a goodbye: A long whir comes from the open, it grates like a nail on the windowpane. I seek the lost sign, the only pledge I had from you as a grace. And hell is certain. In Goethean style, the last poem of the sequence equates renunciation with serenity, and acceptance of limits with the possibility of art. But an ironic tone hovers above it, and no reader who has accompanied the persona in his purgatorial journey will mistake that serenity for a cheaply earned conclusion. The beloved Absent is addressed in the "Motets" as a nameless "Thou," as if to stress the aura of privacy and reverence (though we know from the context of Móntales work that Clizia is implied); but other memorable poems in The Occasions, outside the "Motets" which form its second section, name their re[31]

spective feminine addressees to sketch unique lyrical portraits. One of these is "Dora Markus," among the best known of Montale's poems. It is structured somewhat like a "Motet," in two antiphonal parts. Part II, the author informs us, was written thirteen years after the first, and he seems to have reservations about the coherence of the whole, unlike the great majority of his readers. In the first part the persona remembers a meeting with Dora; in the second, he imagines her anticlimactic life in her remote Austrian home, after so many years. The meeting took place on the Adriatic Sea, near Ravenna, in a lethargic atmosphere which nevertheless contains so much dormant history and a yearning for the East. From the concisely evoked scene the strange figure of Dora arises; she points toward the "invisible" other shore, her "true homeland" (since she is a Jewess, it is east of here), her words "glittered in rainbows like the scales/ of the moribund red mullet." She appears as a creature of mystery: Your restlessness makes me think of migratory birds crashing into the beacons in stormy evenings: your very sweetness is a storm, it whirls and never shows . . . The voice rises effortlessly from the low-keyed, descriptive beginning to a singing alto, with Montale's typical mastery of modulation. And Dora's tragic plight —underscored by the climactic rhyme of "you resist" with the last word "exist" —is counterpointed by a quick enumeration of her small feminine things (lipstick, powderpuff, nail file) among which is an amulet, an ivory mouse (it is supposed to be her salvation). The animal imagery poignantly conveys a doomed vitality. One recognizes its matrix in Cuttlefish Bones, and at the same time one overhears in it a Dantesque vigor to be more especially traced to the canto of Francesca (Inferno V), where the loveliness and tragedy of the [32]

unhappy lady is announced by bird similes (some of migratory species) in a whirlwind background which may correspond to the internalized storm of Dora. In the second part, the fat, lazy carp succeeds the agile red mullet, and geese supersede the migrant birds; these ironic structural effects subtly comment on the fact that Dora is aging. In fact, the refrain expression "sempre più tardi" (ever later) knells at the end of the last two stanzas. The last stanza raises Dora from her bourgeois domestic drabness to set her up as an example of fidelity (to her people, and implicitly to civilization) against the "ferocious faith" that is conquering—obviously Nazism. She is doomed but unvanquished. At this point the individual destiny takes on a choral resonance, and personal elegy becomes historical tragedy. The ethical implications were crystal clear even when the poem first appeared, though the political allusions had to remain oblique. But the message reached those who had ears for it. It is instructive to learn that Montale composed this poem at the mere hint a photograph of Dora Markus' legs gave him; she was an acquaintance of his Triestine friend and mentor Bobi Bazlen, and he never saw her in person. The second part of the poem was actually inspired by another Austrian woman whom the writer knew better, Gerti —and another fine Occasioni poem ("Il carnevale di Gerti" [Gerti's Carnival]) is about her. It goes to prove how precarious the relevance of detailed factual biography must be to the work of art, and how autonomous the work itself is. "Dora Markus" took shape at the instigation of a chance cue, was indeed a literally "occasional" poem; Montale's imagination was ready for it and needed only the appropriate (and unpredictable) incentive. There are recurrent patterns in this imaginative chemistry. First of all, both Dora and the unnamed inspirer of "Motets" and so many other poems, as the poet tells us, are Jewesses, and so is Liuba, the addressee of a madrigal that [33]

manages to combine the quotidian, the minute, and the apocalyptic in a unique grace. As Jewesses, they are persecuted or in danger of being persecuted, and they embody an unflinching loyalty to an ancient minority faith which entails spiritual (if not necessarily physical) survival in an age of horror. Montale's is a poetry of crisis and fidelity; he is a strongly rooted writer, therefore signally endowed to understand this predicament. Second, the rhetorical structure of these poems is based on an I-Thou rapport, on a dialogue of the persona with an absent lady; a dialogue, namely, that is no dialogue, but just an externalized monologue, language reaching out of the besieged monad. In a later poem (from La bufera e altro) that bears the title "For an Unwritten Letter," this existential situation will be emblematized in the image of the bottle from the sea, the sealed message that has not reached its destination. There are precedents for this approach in Leopardi's poetry, whose austerity seems certainly germane to Montale's. One important consequence of such a structural choice on Montale's part is the intimate, urgent tone of the voice. It penetrates, unforgettably. Insofar as they do take a physical shape in the poems, his women are never outwardly described; they exist as intense presences in the mind, through the memory of a gesture, of a milieu and small appurtenances. We have come a long way from the pictorial portrayal of Esterina in "Falsetto"; we are now sounding the psychological depths. Esterina was this side of trouble, she could seize the happy day; Dora, Liuba, Gerti have left this innocence behind, and so has the poet's language. Clizia indeed raises the trial of experience to a hyperbolic level—she is prophetess, Christ-bearing angel, at times even a goddess. So pervasive is this leitmotiv that it almost assimilates to Dora and Liuba and Clizia still another, unnamed, girl to whom the persona speaks (on his archetypal shore) in "La Casa dei [34]

Doganieri" (The Shorewatchers' House). The poet has informed his biographer Nascimbeni that she died young, and this orients our reading of the tolling refrain "Tu non ricordi" ("You don't remember"); but the basic trait of her situation in the poem is absence rather than death; absence subsumes death, death becomes just a form of absence. The piercing eye of the poet catches those elements of observable reality that add up to a prophetical diagnosis of the times; to the deranged compass and undecipherable dice we must add the "mercilessly- turning weathervane," the blinker light of the tanker seeking a way through, and the insistent erosion wreaked by the breakers on the shore; the final image looms as one of impending doom, historical entropy, irretrievable. The house of man is empty, and undermined. The thought of an early death has occasioned a poem worthy of comparison with Yeats s "The Second Coming" or "The Gyres." In still another remarkable poem mentioned above, "Boats on the Marne," the addressee is utterly unrecognizable and might be for all purposes the persona talking to himself. The strength of this poem springs from the unusually variegated (for Le Occasioni) brushstrokes depicting the French fluvial landscape — which of course immediately prompts the persona to meditate on the loss of what was an aboriginal dream of freedom from fear, of justice and happiness, contrasted with the illusory peace and gaiety of the present Sunday scene. On the other hand, in "Corrispondenze" (Correspondences), a title referring to more than Baudelaire's symbolist sonnet, the persona speaks to his mentally arisen "shepherdess without a flock," the apparition having been elicited by the cue of a green woodpecker. She opposes the orgiastic herd of Bacchus —a clear sign of the poet's repudiation of whatever Dionysian leanings he may once have nurtured, for the sake of an intellectual mystique that joins rapture to lucidity. [35]

Irrationalism is out; it has helped Fascism. "Sotto la pioggia" (Under the Rain) again addresses the absent woman. Here the elliptical compression of imagery and referential quotes reaches an acute degree, with swiftly, cinematically presented details that include a Spanish song from a phonograph and a weird echo from St. Theresa's texts of mystical love; the forsaken persona in a gray, rainy landscape thinks of his sweetheart as analogous to the daring of the stork that flies through mists and clouds toward the antipode. The liberating image darts from the mournful context with a thrilling suddenness. It makes the reader think backwards, of the birds in Cuttlefish Bones, and forwards, of the birdlike metamorphoses Clizia will undergo in The Storm and Other Things. The continuity of Montale's poetry is always traceable through its changes. Sometimes the density of literary and topical allusions tilts the poem toward obscurity, as is the case with "Costa San Giorgio" and "Elegia di Pico Farnese" (Elegy at Pico Farnese). In both poems again the persona talks to his absent inspirer, and in the latter one she appears as a "frowning messenger" —a judging angel who condemns the present trend of the world, and who has the healing seeds of the sunflower in her keeping. One gathers that the "goat-men" and the "black fables" assailed by the poet here have to do with Fascism more than with the innocent Catholic folklore of peasants (the latter, indeed, may serve just as a semantic disguise for the former, the real target), but the context remains tortuous even after some pointed lexical exegesis by Luciano Rebay. It is not Montale at his best, poetically speaking, perhaps because the political circumstances compel him to resort to doubletalk. "Palio" (the setting is Siena's famous costume racing event) moves along a similar line, yet with greater poetical consistency. Clizia looks beyond the present turmoil, toward a future (or a permanence) that will offset it; and it is in such a posture that we meet her again in "Hitlerian Spring" (a poem dating from the [36]

late thirties, but first published in the postwar volume, The Storm and Other Things). Montale's transcendental hypothesis has become a way to confront history; compared to this, even the sunburnt landscape of Cuttlefish Bones was an Eden; we are now dealing with a lay eschatology that will stay with Montale through the war years and after. "Palio" was written in the crucial year 1939. The events of that year, with the political climate that had led up to them and that Montale's writings had implicitly diagnosed or denounced, exasperated the poet, who urges Clizia to "forget" what is a triumphing "death" and the "babblings of the damned"; he (being identical here with his persona) concludes as he had started, on the fatalistic note of the spinning top —an emblem of unavertible fate, like the wheel of "Eastbourne" and like the Palio race itself, which goes around in circles. Clizia wears a ruby which radiates clairvoyance; the poem itself is such a ruby, being "peopled with images" from a serener time, from "the day of the living," preserving the concrete idea of what the human world should be, prophesying through memory. The poem, like the emblematic ruby, encases values in its protective crystal, a language both hard and dazzlingly clear. "Notizie dall'Amiata" (News from the Amiata), the last piece of the book, moves on a rather different level because, even if it also takes shape as a passionate conjuring of the absent angel who is Montale's Ewig Weibliches, it leaves out any such political denunciations as those "Palio" revolves on; it seems to voice a mournful resignation to limited reality, to the world of natural necessity, that very world She is called upon to challenge with Her noumenal freedom. The poem therefore talks back to one from Cuttlefish Bones, "Chrysalis," which uttered such poignant yearnings for the idea of freedom as opposed to the chains of determinisi necessity. "News from the Amiata" is a difficult poem to interpret, both because of its private references and because [37]

the transcendental Thou which elicits the persona's utterance seems to undergo transformation in the course of the writing. The speaker is writing a letter to her, "from the honey cell/ of a sphere flung into space," from a quiet refuge in the tormented planet; and at the end (Part III) she is immersed in "deep sleep," but nightly porcupines "unite the [persona's] vigil" with her sleep "which receives them": is she dead now? or fused with Mother Earth? The scene is particularized to stress the gray, rainy autumnal season, an All Souls' Day in the famous Tuscan resort located on an extinguished volcano. One thing seems obvious: political commitment, aroused by the catastrophic events of the time, wavers between indignation and despair, and despair at times tends to freeze into fatalistic resignation. One sees what drama smoulders in the Occasioni monochrome. Stoic resignation fails to assuage the poet's protest in the war poems of La bufera e altro. Those of Part I ("Finisterre"), which were first published at Lugano, Switzerland, in 1942, have to keep that protest hidden from censorship and thus emphasize the hermetic vein of The Occasions; they talk in emblems or even riddles, they drape themselves in an aristocratic literary diction which is unlike anything earlier, for a number of reasons. Ramat thinks the Petrarchan influence of Montale's Florentine friends in the hermeticist group is now making itself felt, and we notice a tendency to greater elliptical compression and to the Petrarchan sonnet form, but these factors combine with the political circumstances as well as with the poet's need for new developments in his style. It is at about this time that he translated three sonnets by Shakespeare. The remaining poems of the book, which appeared after the definitive fall of Fascism, can afford to be more explicit; in fact, some of them had been written during or even before the war years but had to wait for the postwar period to appear in print, "Hitlerian Spring" being the best [38]

example. Comparison with "Gli Orecchini" (The Earrings), one of the "Finisterre" sonnets, shows the marked difference —along with the basic identity of theme. "The Earrings" conceals an apocalyptic vein in a precious diction; Clizia is the subject and the addressee of the sonnet, and she retains thg angelic attributes we know from The Occasions, in a context that briefly but poignantly includes the background of a mindlessly destructive war, to conclude on a veiled reference to her persecuted Jewish ancestors. The secretive allusions and the compressed imagery combine with the closed sonnet form (regardless of the freedom Montale reserves, as always, in the matter of rhyming) to give us a carefully chiseled jewel whose light we must learn to scrutinize; once again, as in "Palio," the jewelry mentioned in the context is focal to the total meaning and can be said to reflect in capsule form the whole poem as such. In "Hitlerian Spring," on the contrary, Clizia is named along with her biblical background, and the persona waives reticence in his passionate denunciation of the historical form evil has taken; obliquity makes room for directness, allusion is superseded by eloquence, and accordingly we get an open metric form, unrhymed pentameters and hexameters flowing in a rush of focused description, invective, and prayer. It's 1938, and Hitler is officially received and feted by Mussolini at Florence; the "Steel Pact" between the two dictators begins to show its consequences, and Hitler is branded as a "messenger of hell" in the poem; "water keeps gnawing/ at the banks and no one is guiltless by now." It's a "wounded Spring"; Clizia, the Sunflower Lady, is asked to "look on high": . . . you who, yourself changed, keep unchanged love in you, until the blind sun you harbor within may be dazzled in the Other and destroyed in Him, for all . . . [39]

A new dawn, free of terror, is invoked "for all, tomorrow . . ." This poem, along with others in the war period and some essays Montale wrote during the Liberation and immediately after, shows our poet in a committed mood. Hope for a better world, concern for the human race at large, and a fighting spirit for the cause go hand in hand. In this light, even the Dantesque references of "Hitlerian Spring" take on an added significance (two lines are quoted from a sonnet of uncertain Dantesque authorship, about Ovidian Clytia, the girl transmuted into a sunflower; one of these lines is affixed as epigraph to the poem, and the other one, referring to the metamorphosis with a concision of truly Dantesque vigor, appears in the lines just quoted). For all his indignation and his transcendent vision, Dante never lost sight of the human community. Neither does Montale at this particular juncture; it's as if the blows of an adverse public history had roused old "Arsenio" from his desperate paralysis. Montale in fact joined the Partito d'Azione (a minority liberal party) in the mid-to-late forties, though he eventually left it in disillusionment. This postwar disillusionment—ideologically documented by most of the prose pieces Montale wrote in the fifties and sixties in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, and then collected in the volume Auto da fè — finds a poetical embodiment in Bufera poems like "Proda di Versilia" (Versilia Shore). It starts and develops as a private meditation on his dead family and Ligurian past, only to conclude on the bitter note of disgust for the present (postwar) years, which, compared to the idealized and "measurable" times of youth, prove filthy and shapeless (a "sea of clay and muck"). This reminiscent poem, with implications to be later developed by Satura (1963), stands out for its lack of any reference to Clizia; but it's not as if she had vanished from the poet's spiritual horizon in the (for him) disappointing postwar years. [40]

It's only that, by comparison with the Occasioni and "Finisterre" interlude when she seemed likely to interfere with human affairs, by the sheer power of her prophetic rage, now she keeps aloof, more so than ever, and only her worshiper knows her; the rapport is private and not choral, she is a light shining in darkness, but men love darkness better than light. Some such predicament was already intimated in "Giorno e Notte" (Day and Night), one of the "Finisterre" lyrics, where Clizia appears as an angelic skylark, killed in a doomsday. "Iride" (Iris), perhaps the most impervious of The Storm's poems (if we except "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel"), presents Clizia as the unheeded Christ-bearer to an unreceptive mankind; she flies "in the night of the world" and her worshiper, as the speaker of the poem, is a "Nestorian" heretic, a Christian who disagrees with the established Church. Intimations of Gnostic Manichaeism seem to emerge here and there, especially since Montale's position has by now become so unworldly. In "L'ombra della Magnolia" (The Shadow of the Magnolia) again Clizia is a migratory bird, bearing the stigmata of Christ, and as such she brings "war" (the war of the chosen spirits against a vulgarized world); the persona declares that now "begins the harder way"—now that the open confrontation with tangible evil in public form has ceased with the fall of Nazism, the threat of spiritual death may be subtler, and that much harder to dispel. The persona takes shape at the end of the poem as a mullet leaping to his death onto dry land at the call of his transcendent Beloved. It is easy to see why this third book of Montale's, going so much against the grain, should have baffled some ideologically committed readers and elicited mixed or lukewarm reviews, especially from some leftist litterateurs. But he was not after popularity, either from the right or from the left; he thought that the two mass parties which have divided the allegiance of the Italian [41]

majority since World War II were both wrong, and he abhorred the seductions of mass culture. "Piccolo Testamento" (A Little Testament) and "Il Sogno del Prigioniero" (The Prisoner's Dream), the two last poems of the book, give artistic form to this tragic disengagement. His ideal has become private once again — and he is not comfortable about it, to judge from "Anniversario" (Anniversary), where he laments that he cannot share with all his fellow men the "gift" now accessible to himself alone. "Anniversary" comes immediately before the two "Provisional Conclusions," as he has titled the two last pieces. "A Little Testament" has a moving intensity: the frail light in his mind has nothing to do with those kindled by "red or black clerics," it is a "rainbow" he is bequeathing as a legacy to his feminine interlocutor, to seal "a faith that was fought,/ a hope that burned slower/ than a hard log on the hearth" —and this is all that will be left to her when the final "blackout" comes, in the general mad dance, with the advent of a "shadowy Lucifer" who shakes his fatigued bituminous wings. In "The Prisoner's Dream" the Montalian persona dons a medieval costume to depict the poet's predicament in a world increasingly menaced by mass tyranny, purges, conformism, and alienation; but he will never surrender this dream of the savior Lady. He might well appropriate the words of Dora Markus: "one does not surrender voice, legend or destiny." One cannot quarrel with the tragic vision, even if one may question the prophecy. Móntales disengagement is consistent with his whole career; he is an aristocratic defender of those personal values which today's mass ideologies reject, and this makes his poetry that much deeper and relevant precisely because, like Yeats's or Eliot's, it takes an anachronistic stand. The Whitmanesque hymn "En Masse" is not for him. On the other hand, notice how unpredictable he can be. The Kafkaesque myths I have just summarized do not prevent Mon[42]

tale from writing love lyrics of surprising tenderness to a young lady who carries the nickname "Fox" — great praise from a writer addicted to magical bestiaries. Nor does his somber vision of the contemporary world stop him from uttering a life-affirming hymn, "L'Anguilla" (The Eel), which rushes in one protracted headlong sentence as an antiphon to the gloomy denunciations of historical entropy. The eel (an avatar of the Fox) is the victorious life force that conquers aridity. Both the nirvanic climate of Cuttlefish Bones and the historical pessimism of The Occasions and The Storm seem superseded here; of course it's a matter of "provisional conclusions" on the part of such an undogmatic writer that he cannot even systematize his skepticism. He is a Christian without a Church (and in this respect, too, the third book brings a new note), a modern spirit who rejects the idols of the age, an unworldly artist who can move at perfect ease in the world, an Italian who stubbornly clings to his family memories and cultural traditions without renouncing the privilege of taking the whole West for his province. This is part of the charm that Montale's prose works, published during his Milanese period along with and after The Storm, have for the discriminating reader. The most important of them so far is The Butterfly of Dinard, which comes very close to being a fictional autobiography. It shows his lighter vein, his Svevian kind of humor, and the same affectionate memory that stirs at the center of so much of his verse. It pays to compare this "autobiography" to the earlier one in the sunstruck pages of Cuttlefish Bones. The same longing for lost innocence emerges, though in the very different form the prose genre entails; his prose is anything but "poetical," it plays on self-deflation, and in short it thrives on its prosiness. Whether essayist or short-story writer, Montale knows how to hold the reader's interest without thereby sacrificing his own sobriety. And the link with the apocalyptic poet of The Storm is not miss[43]

ing; he evokes the dead and he dreams of the afterworld, in a peculiarly muted tone. All in all, his versatility as a writer is confirmed. If the Butterfly gives us "twice told tales" from his childhood and youthful memories, along with the stories of a wider world observed at leisure in his mature years, Auto da fè gathers many "occasional" pages from a long career as reviewer or general critic to outline for us an important aspect of his intellectual development, and the epistolary exchange with Italo Svevo documents his flair as literary critic. Fuori di Casa (Abroad), the most recent to date of these prose works, gives us Montale the seasoned traveler, the connoisseur of places, tastes, and men, the journalist who never forgets he is a poet even if he refuses to wear the official mask of The Bard. Nor has the poet in verse retired from the scene. Satura of 1971 has reassured Montale's readers that they can always expect something new from him. The novelty in this last book, a matter of satirical impishness, is naturally of the kind that springs from a lifelong coherence. In its prevalent gnomic vein, self-deflation alternates with the debunking of fashionable public myths to reassert the inviolability of truth, at times even in open quarrel with those critics who thought they could "place" our poet's work within the boundaries of some comfortable formula. Yet deep tenderness and metaphysical irony compound the etching-like quality of "Xenia" in this book, while a lyrical effusion of the Clizia-inspired type marks the "Dopo una fuga" (After a Flight) series, and a surrealist fervor makes "L'angelo nero" (The Black Angel) as memorable as any of Montale's major poems. All in all, a kind of posthumous stance characterizes the persona in Satura as well as in the tonally contiguous Diario del '71 (Diary of 1971), which has come to confirm Montale's peculiar wisdom, a wisdom nurtured by stubborn negations but also by the refusal to dogmatize negation itself. [44]

SELECTED

BIBLIOGRAPHY

NOTE: Since World War II, Montale's main volumes of verse have been published, or reissued, by Mondadori in Milan. The same firm has also issued a new edition of the prose work, La farfalla di Dinard, and is about to issue two volumes of collected essays on Italian and foreign literature.

Principal Works of Eugenio Montale Ossi di seppia. Turin, Gobetti, 1925. Le Occasioni. Turin, Einaudi, 1939. Quaderno di traduzioni. Milan, Edizioni della Meridiana, 1948. La bufera e altro. Venice, Neri Pozza editore, 1956. La farfalla di Dinard. Venice, Neri Pozza*editore, 1956. Satura. Verona, private printing, 1962. Accordi e pastelli, poesie. Milan, Scheiwiller, 1962. Eugenio Montale—Lettere—Italo Svevo (con gli scritti di Montale su Svevo). Bari, De Donato, 1966. Auto da fè. Milan, Casa editrice II Saggiatore, 1966. Fuori di Casa. Milan-Naples, Riccardo Ricciardi, 1969. Satura (includes the "Satura" poems of 1962, the privately printed "Xenia" poems of 1966, and several previously unpublished or uncollected poems). Milan, Mondadori, 1971. Diario del '71. Milan, private printing, 1971. Principal Translations in English of Montale's Works Poems by Eugenio Montale, tr. by Edwin Morgan. Reading, England, University of Reading, 1959. Poesie di Montale tr. da Robert Lowell, con uno studio di Alfredo Rizzardi. Bologna, Edizioni della Lanterna, 1960. (Subsequently included, with three additions, in Lowell's Imitations, New York, Farrar, 1961.) Quarterly Review of Literature, Montale issue, 1962, No. 4. Ed. by Irma Brandeis. Poesie/Poems, tr. by George Kay. Edinburgh, at the University Press, 1964. Selected Poems, with an introduction by Glauco Cambon. New York, New Directions, 1966. Xenia, tr. by G. Singh. Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, 1970. [45]

Butterfly of Dinard, tr. by G. Singh. London, London Magazine Editions, 1970. Provisional Conclusions, a Selection of the Poetry of Eugenio Montale, tr. in consultation with the poet by Edith Farnsworth. Chicago, Regnery, 1970. Critical Works and Commentary NOTE: Extensive bibliographies appear in Cary and in Ramat, listed below, and in the appendix to Montale and Dante by Arshi Pipa (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1968).

Almansi, Guido. "Earth and Water in Móntales Poetry," Forum for Modern Language Studies, II, No. 4 (October, 1966), 3 7 7 - 8 5 . Antonielli, Sergio. "Eugenio Montale," in Aspetti e figure del Novecento. Parma, Guanda, 1950. Avalle, D'Arco Silvio. Tre saggi su Montale. Turin, Einaudi, 1970. Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio. "Montale, la metrica e altro," Letteratura, 1961, No. 51. Binni, Walter. "Omaggio a Montale," La rassegna della letteratura italiana, Montale issue, 1966, Nos. 2 - 3 . Bo, Carlo. "Della poesia di Montale," in Otto studi. Florence, Vallecchi, 1939. Bonfiglioli, Carlo. "Dante Pascoli Montale," in Nuovi Studi Pascoliani. Bolzano-Cesena, Centro di cultura dell'Alto Adige e Società di Studi Romagnoli, 1963. — "Pascoli e Montale," in L'Archiginnasio, Bollettino della Biblioteca Comunale di Bologna, Numero speciale per il centenario della nascita di G. Pascoli. Bologna, Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1962. — " I l 'ritorno dei morti' da Pascoli a Montale," in Pascoli, Atti del convegno nazionale di studi pascoliani. Santarcangelo di Romagna, S.T.E.M., 1962. Bonora, Ettore. La poesia di Montale. 2 vols. Turin, Editrice Tirrenia, 1965. Cambon, Glauco. "Eugenio Móntales 'Motets': The Occasions of Epiphany," PMLA, 1967, No. 7. — " L a Forma dinamica de 'L'orto' di Montale, in Letteratura, 1966, Nos. 7 9 - 8 1 , Montale issue, and in Omaggio a Montale, ed. by Silvio Ramat, Milan, Mondadori, 1966. — "The Garden of Apocalyptic Memory," Quarterly Review of Literature, Montale issue, 1962, No. 4. [46]

—"Montale dantesco e bruegheliano," Aut-Aut, 1956, No. 35. Reprinted in La Lotta con Proteo, Milan, Bompiani, 1963, with the title "Montale e l'altro." Translated as "Eugenio Móntales Poetry, a Meeting of Dante and Brueghel," Sewanee Review, Winter, 1958. Revised and included in Dante's Craft, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1969, as "Eugenio Móntales Dantesque Style." Carpi, Umberto. "Montale dopo il fascismo: i primi anni di collaborazione al Corriere della Sera," Belfagor, Vol. XXIII, Nov. 2, (March, 1968). — Montale dopo il fascismo dalla "Bufera" a "Satura." Padua, Editrice Liviana, 1971. —"Montale negli anni '60," Belfagor, Vol. XXV, No. 1 (January, 1970). Cary, Joseph. Three Modem Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale. New York, New York University Press, 1969. Chiappelli, Fredi. Langage traditionnel et langage personnel dans la poésie italienne contemporaine. Neuchatel, Université de Neuchatel, 1951. Cornelio, Tony. "Dante e Montale," Dimensioni, 1961, 5-6. Contini, Gianfranco. "Introduzione agli Ossi di Seppia" and "Dagli Ossi alle Occasioni," in Esercizi di lettura sopra autori contemporanei. Florence, Parenti, 1939. —"Montale e la Bufera," Letteratura, 1956, No. 24. De Robertis, Giuseppe. "La Bufera e altro," in Altro Novecento. Florence, Le Monnier, 1962. —"Ossi di Seppia" and "Le Occasioni," in Scrittori del Novecento. Florence, Le Monnier, 1946. Forti, Marco. "Montale fuori di casa: implicazioni e concordanze," Il Bimestre, No. 3-4, July-October, 1969. — L e proposte della poesia. Milan, Mursia, 1963. Flora, Francesco. "Eugenio Montale," in Scrittori italiani contemporanei. Pisa, Nistri-Lischi, 1952. Gargiulo, Alfredo. "Introduzione agli Ossi di Seppia" and "Eugenio Montale, Le Occasioni," in Letteratura italiana del Novecento. Florence, Le Monnier, 1958. Getto, Giovanni. "Montale," in Poeti, critici e cose varie del Novecento. Florence, Sansoni, 1963. Giuliani, Alfredo. "Il fantasma di Montale," in Immagini e maniere. Milan, Feltrinelli, 1965. Jacomuzzi, Angelo. Sulla poesia di Montale. Bologna, Cappelli, 1968. Macrì, Oreste. Realtà del simbolo. Florence, Vallecchi, 1968. [47]

Manacorda, Giuliano. Montale. Florence, La nuova Italia, 1969. Mariani, Gaetano. "Eugenio Montale," in Poesia e tecnica nella lirica del Novecento. Padua, Editrice Liviana, 1958. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. "Da d'Annunzio a Montale," in Ricerche sulla lingua poetica contemporanea, ed. Folena. Padua, Editrice Liviana, 1966. Nascimbeni, Giulio. Eugenio Montale. Milan, Longanesi, 1969. Pancrazi, Pietro. "Eugenio Montale, poeta fisico e metafisico," in Scrittori d'oggi. Bari, Laterza, 1946. Peritore, Giuseppe Antonio. "Le prime letture di Eugenio Montale," Belfagor, 1964, No. 3. Pozzi, Gianni. La poesia italiana del Novecento. Turin, Einaudi, 1965. Praz, Mario. "T. S. Eliot and Eugenio Montale," in T. S. Eliot, a Symposium, ed. March and Tambimuttu. London, Editions Poetry, 1948. Ramat, Silvio. Montale. Florence, Vallecchi, 1965. Ramat, Silvio, ed. Omaggio a Montale. Milan, Mondadori, 1966. Rebay, Luciano. "I diàspori di Montale," Italica, Vol. XLVI, No. 1 (1969). Salinari, Carlo. "Montale dopo La Bufera," in La questione del realismo. Florence, Parenti, 1960. Sanguineti, Edoardo. Fra liberty e crepuscolarismo. Milan, Mursia, 1963. Seroni, Adriano. "Commento ad 'Arsenio'," in Ragioni critiche. Florence, Vallecchi, 1944. Solmi, Sergio. Scrittori negli anni. Milan, Il Saggiatore, 1963. Tedesco, Natale. La condizione crepuscolare. Florence, La nuova Italia, 1970.

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