SOURCE: "Prose Glosses: Is Poetry Still Possible?" in Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 136-54.

[An English journalist, novelist, and critic, West championed equality for women and other liberal political views. In the following excerpt, she studies Montale's prose writings for insights into his thoughts about the function of poetry.]

In his career as a journalist Montale wrote innumerable prose pieces, some of which have already been anthologized in Auto da fé and Sulla poesia, others of which have still to be gathered. He has published two collections of short prose: Farfalla di Dinard, which is made up of stories and prose pieces, and Fuori di casa, which consists of his travel pieces….

I should like to concentrate attention on a few texts that are particularly revealing of Montale's poetics and of his beliefs concerning the function and meaning of poetry. These prose pieces are not necessarily explicit or direct commentaries on individual poems or collections of poetry, although as Cesare Segre and others have shown, this is a legitimate and profitable way of using the prose [Segre, "Invito alla 'Farfalla di Dinard," in I segni e la critica, 1970]. However, these pieces do provide us with further insight into Montale's attitudes toward life and art and can be considered, therefore, as ancilla poesis, leading to a deeper understanding of his poetry's origins and goals.

The short essay-story "La poesia non esiste" ("Poetry Does Not Exist") was originally published in Corriere della Sera on October 5, 1946. It is directly tied to the war, which was an immediate reality in the Italy of 1944, the year in which the story takes place. The setting of the story, Montale's apartment in Florence, draws into its walls the dangers assailing the world outside while containing the more truly interior preoccupations of the poet concerning poetry and its function within the collectivity of people to whom its existence matters. The setting serves as a frame that comments ironically on the dialogue, the former being realistic, very much down-to-earth, and fraught with a sense of the immediate contigencies of personal threat—of the war, in short—while the latter is of the much less tangible realm of intellectual, philosophical discourse, abstract and remote from the battles raging outside. The two are played off one another in a vivacious, even humorous manner, but the essential seriousness of both cannot be ignored.

The season is "the dark winter" of 1944. The narrator has opened his home to those Italians who are being sought by the German army for their partisan activities. These guests include Brunetto, a friend, and several others whom Montale calls, in English, "flying ghosts," men who come and go each evening and whose identities remain unknown to their host. The evening in question is being passed by the radio and the electric heater when suddenly the concierge calls up to warn the men of the arrival of a German soldier. The moment is tense, and the tension is heightened by such phrases as "there was no time to waste"; "what would the friends do?"; "perhaps the German wasn't alone." The frightened guests hasten to hide in a darkened room as their host moves slowly toward the door. He opens it to find a young German officer, "a youth of little more than twenty years of age, almost two meters tall, with a hooked nose like a bird of prey, and two eyes, both timid and wild, under a disordered, brushlike lock of hair." He is holding a roll of paper, which he points toward the narrator as if it were a "colubrina" (a sort of musket). Up to this point in the story we are in the world of action, threat, and uncertainty. The scene might be likened in impact to the opening shorts of Rossellini's Città aperta (Open City), a film concerning the partisan fight, which depicts men in a situation analogous to that of the three men in Montale's narrative. These first few paragraphs are in fact cinematographic in style. There is sparse descriptive detail, only enough information about the men and the room as is minimally necessary to establish a picture of them. Then come several swift movements or pans: the answering of the telephone, the men's disappearance, the host's quick switching of radio stations, the sound of the doorbell, the unbolting of the door. There is no dialogue. The reader's attention is completely fixed on the opening door and the figure standing at the threshold.

The description of the German, whose appearance reminds the narrator of a "bird of prey" and who points a threatening-looking object at the host, is a masterful cliché in either film or fiction: the climax of suspense, the moment in a movie when the music would swell dramatically and the camera fix on the frightened face of the Italian. The suspense is broken in a most unorthodox fashion by the German's first words: "I am a literary, and I bring you the poems you asked me for." In its tense context this declaration takes on a humorous aspect, so completely in appropriate and unexpected is it. Not only has the German brought poems rather than guns, but he has introduced himself incorrectly as a letterario, a "literary." The narrator immediately comments: "Certainly he meant a man of letters." The absurdity of the moment is intensified by this correction, for even in a state of fear the narrator hastens to correct in a mental note the German's bad Italian. This is our first glimpse of the host's dry wit, which becomes more obvious as the story advances. We must now begin to reorient ourselves, just as the narrator must do, for the classic wartime drama has taken a decidedly original turn.

All of this is accomplished in a page and a half; Montale's prose, like his poetry, tends to the understated, using the swift stroke, the minimal. The dialogue, introduced by the German's words, continues in the host's response. "Very flattered," he remarks that the young man's name is not unknown to him: "This is a great honor for me. How might I be of service?" At this point begins a long paragraph, the essential one, constructed entirely of description and "indirect free discourse." We learn that the German, Ulrich, had written to the narrator several years before concerning his translations of some Italian poetry, and the narrator had in turn asked that the young man send him a collection of Hölderlin's lyrics that were not available in Italy at that time. Ulrich never answered his request but, ironically, has turned up two years later and under the most inappropriate of circumstances with a typed copy of some three hundred pages of the poetry. He apologizes for having based his transcription on the Zinkernagel edition rather than on that of Hellingrath but is confident that "sein gnädiger Kollege" (his esteemed colleague) will be able to order the poems correctly with a few months' work. Ulrich asks for nothing in return, except perhaps for copies of some Italian poems. The irony of the situation is by now rampant; the two scholars are politely exchanging notes while Montale remarks in parentheses that he is in a cold sweat, "and not only in view of the hard work" of selecting appropriate "illustrious moderns" for the eager young German.

The visitor settles in to tell his life story. He says that he arranges concerts on the piazza of the Italian city where he is now stationed; he himself is a musician who plays, the narrator vaguely recalls, "the bugle or the fife." Before the war he was a student of philosophy, dedicated to finding and explaining "the essence of Life" and to disproving the assertion that philosophic speculation is a vicious circle that "bites its own tail, a whirling of thought around itself." He had been disillusioned in his search, however, for the professor under whose tutelage he explored the possibility of the Dasein, the "existential I in flesh and blood," took a dislike to him and kindly showed him the door. What was left to him was poetry, which however proved equally disenchanting. A brief if devastating survey follows: Homer was not a man, "and everything that departs from the human results as extraneous to man." The Greek lyrics are hopelessly fragmentary; Pindar's mythical, musical world is no longer ours; Latin oratory is equally out of our reach. Dante, whose name is brought up by the narrator in what one must imagine as a hesitant question, is "grandissimo," but one reads him as a pensum; Shakespeare is too natural, Goethe not natural enough. So much for the entire Western poetic tradition. "And the moderns?" the narrator asks, as he pours out the last of the Chianti that has accompanied their conversation. The young man dismisses them with equal dispatch: "They never give the impression of stability; we are too much a party to them to be able to evaluate them." He concludes: "Believe me, poetry doesn't exist … and then, then … a perfect poem would be like a philosophic system that completely satisfies, it would be the end of life, an explosion, a collapse, and an imperfect poem is not a poem. Better to struggle … with the girls."

With these words Ulrich stands, wishes his host a good digestion of Hölderlin, while Montale tells us that he hadn't the courage to reveal that he had stopped studying German two years before, and takes his leave. The narrator then goes into the darkened room where the men have been hiding, and Brunetto asks: "Has your German gone away then? And what did he have to say to you?" The answer is succinct: "He says that poetry doesn't exist." Brunetto's response to this is a simple "ah," accompanied by Giovanni's snores; the two men are sleeping, we are told, "in a very narrow bed."

This story is surely one of the most original and striking illustrations of the dichotomy between art and life as well as a subtly humorous depiction of the ironic relationship of the active to the contemplative life. The evaluation of poetry is presented through several filters: the wartime setting, the tense realities of the apartment hideout, the German's youth and naïveté, the narrator's essential silence, and the partisans' reactions to the German's conclusion that poetry does not exist. Had Montale presented these thoughts on the existence or nonexistence of poetry in a straightforward essay, as in fact he has done elsewhere to some degree, our reception of them would have been entirely different. Here we see the vacuity of the discussion, given the very real issues and threats assailing the men and given Ulrich's extreme youth and idealism. Yet we also understand the human import of the meeting; the enemy is a twenty-year-old boy who has made the trip to the narrator's apartment not to conquer him and his concealed guests but rather to bring him Hölderlin's poetry and perhaps simply to find a kindred soul with whom to discuss those things most real and most essential to him. In spite of Ulrich's negative conclusions concerning the life of poetry, the story shows just how persistently poetry does in fact exist, not certainly as a perfected abstraction, "un'esplosione," but as an eccentric, unexpected, even inappropriate gift emerging out of the darkness of the Florentine evening and disappearing back into it. Nor does poetry in any way alter the reality surrounding it, a reality that turns its back and begins to snore. There is good reason for this indifference: Brunetto and Giovanni have no reason to care about the existence of poetry when their lives are at stake. There are no grand gestures here, no clearly defined heroes or villians. The narrator is a gracious host to the Italian partisans and to the German alike. He is neither a hero nor a coward but quite simply a man capable of seeing the inadequacies of both life and art. The story is a perfect example of Montale's very basic belief in daily decency and a masterful dramatization of his self-portrait as expressed in "Intervista immaginaria": "I have lived my time with the minimum of cowardice that had been allowed to my weak powers, but there are those who did more, even if they did not publish books."

Montale rarely wrote poems as explicitly tied to the war as this prose piece, although "Finisterre" and La bufera are deeply imbued with the horror and tragedy of the war years. There is, however, a poem in Quaderno, written in 1975, which harks back to the First World War, in which Montale saw action. In "L'eroismo" ("Heroism") the poet reveals his dreams of glory, encouraged by his beloved Clizia: "Clizia mi suggeriva di ingaggiarmi / tra i guerriglieri di Spagna … " (Clizia suggested that I might enlist / with the guerrilla fighters of Spain). But no such glory was his, and he remembers little of his actual military experience except for "futile exertions," "the irksome / clicking of the gunners." He also recalls "Un prigioniero mio / che aveva in tasca un Rilke e fummo amici / per pochi istanti" (My very own prisoner / who had Rilke in his pocket and we were friends / for a few instants). Ulrich and the prisoner are spiritually one and the same. Both men emerge from the generalizations of war as sparsely sketched and yet unforgettable human beings, one lugging around his three-hundred-page typescript of Hölderlin and the other his small Rilke. This is where poetry exists not only for Montale but for anyone who recognizes that, as Montale writes in "The Truth" in Quaderno existence is often nothing more than "una tela di ragno" (a spider's web), infinitely tenuous, subjective, and minimal.

The essay "Tornare nella strada" (To Go Back to the Street) was first published in 1949. It is not, like "Style and Tradition" or "The Solitude of the Artist," usually singled out as an important statement by Montale worthy of translation and redistribution; yet I believe that it is highly revealing of Montale's attitude toward art and art's continuing life. The piece is in part a polemic against what Montale calls "current art," which is characterized by its rejection of form and its attachment to the concepts of immediacy, the ephermal, and the solipsistic. In contrast Montale offers a conservative view of art, which is fully incarnated in form and which truly exists only when it attains "its second and greater life: that of memory and of individual, small circulation."

The essay consists primarily of a definition of this second life as proposed by Montale. He begins by emphasizing the necessity of created art: "The uncreated work of art, the unwritten book, the masterpiece that could have been born and was not born are mere abstractions and illusions." But art does not end with the creation of works, for a work does not fully live until it is "received, understood, or misunderstood by someone: by the public." This public can consist of only one person, "as long as it is not the author himself." Furthermore, the success of art does not depend on the immediate consumption or enjoyment of the work of art "with an instant relationship of cause and effect," but rather "its obscure pilgrimage across the consciousness and the memory of people, its complete reflux back into life whence art itself drew its first nourishment." Montale states, "It is this second moment, of minute consumption and even of misunderstanding, that makes up what interests me the most in art."

The poet then goes on to give several examples of this phenomenon in his own experience: Svevo's Zeno always comes to mind when he sees a group of indifferent people following a funeral procession or when the north wind blows; he always sees a face of Piero or Mantegna or thinks of Manzoni's line "era folgore l'aspetto" (her face was a lightning flash) when he meets Clizia or other beloved ladies; Paul Klee's Zoo comes to mind when he thinks of strange animals, "zebra or zebu." The issue is not that of easy memorability, for if this were the case "Chiabrera would beat Petrarch, Metastasio would outsell Shakespeare," but of art, which can give to someone a sense of "liberation and of comprehension of the world." What Montale believes in is the essential importance of the "incalculable and absurd existence" of art, which is not necessarily equal to "an objective vitality and importance of art itself." Another series of examples follows: someone can face death for a noble cause while whistling "Funiculì funicolà"; Catullus can come to mind in an austere cathedral, and conversely a religious aria of Handel can accompany a "profane desire"; we can remember a poem by Poliziano "even in days of madness and slaughter." Montale concludes that "everything is uncertain, nothing is necessary in the world of artistic refractions; the only necessity is that such refraction sooner or later be rendered possible."

The essay was written for a newspaper and not as a fully developed excursus on art; I do not therefore want to inflate its content or the depth of its argumentation. It is written well, alternating between discursive prose and striking concrete examples of what Montale himself has experienced as the second life of art. It reveals Montale's readiness to engage in polemics, his ability to take a stand and unequivocally argue its virtues. But what he is arguing here is also very much tied to the values at work in his equivocal, understated poetry: the importance of the marginal, the individual, the incalculable in art as well as in life. These eccentric and minimal qualities must, however, be fully expressed in artistic forms and cannot have meaning if they remain in the realm of the abstract or the mystical. Emotions and virtues or vices are highly abstract things, as are general concepts such as Life and Art, but they can be concretized not in order that their true essence be fixed once and for all but rather to enable them to be shared by others living through them. Given Montale's views on the unreliability of language and his uncertainty concerning history, either individual or collective, it is not surprising that he clings to this essentially minimal life of art, which can be as fraught with "misunderstandings" and contingencies as any communicative act. The central concern is that one be committed to the possibility of some sort of exchange in spite of the necessarily partial and imperfect nature of it.

Montale's own poetry has itself taken on this second life. His flora and fauna (the sunflower, the eel, the mouse, the butterfly); his locales (the customs house, the garden, the seashore); his talismanic objects (the ivory mouse, the shoehorn, the earrings); his beloved women (Clizia, Dora Markus, Gerti, Mosca, Annetta): all these and many more have entered into the psyches and hearts of his readers. I for one experience them as as much a part of my life as actual people, places, and things I know firsthand. They all serve as points of contact; they have taken hold and have thus reentered the cycle of life from which they emerged. They have the power to inform life because they themselves live in poems that make them matter. An indifferent or mediocre rendering of any individual experience or insight will condemn it to death no matter how intensely meaningful it might have been for the author. All people take with them to the isolation and silence of the grave the vital diversity and uniqueness of their own lives unless they are communicated and passed on through words and acts that transcend the death of the body. Like all great artists Montale leaves behind an indelible mark: his art, which is thoroughly imbued with "that ultimate hypothesis of sociality that an art born from life always has: to return to life, to serve man, to count as something for man."

"Farfalla di Dinard" ("Butterfly of Dinard") is a very brief story that provides the title of the collection of stories first published in 1956. It is the final story of the collection, and its last sentence is beautifully closural: "I bent my head and when I lifted it again I saw that on the vase of dahlias the butterfly was no more." Given the symbolic value of the butterfly in Montale's poetry—in "Vecchi versi" and "Omaggio a Rimbaud" especially but implicitly in the figure of Clizia, who is herself a creature of flight—the disappearance of this butterfly signifies much more than is expressed on the simple denotative level. The story is both allusive and concrete, as Cesare Segre has pointed out in his article "Invito alla 'Farfalla di Dinard'" [in Per conoscere Montale]. It seems almost a poem in prose in its movement from the initial "horizontality" of the opening lines to the "rare and expressive adjectives" and "unexpected metaphors" of its development. But it is also rooted in the terra firma of prosaic irony and the common sense of the waitress who sees no butterfly at all. The story relates the following: A "little saffron-colored butterfly" has visited the narrator each day at his table in a café in Brittany. On the eve of his departure he is seized with the desire to know if it is a sign from his beloved, a "secret message." He decides to ask the waitress if she will check to see if the butterfly continues to appear after his departure, writing him a simple yes or no. "Stuttering," he explains that he is "an amateur entomologist" and asks the favor. The waitress responds in French: "A butterfly? A yellow butterfly?" and adding in Italian, "But I see nothing. Look closer." The butterfly is nowhere to be seen.

The butterfly can be interpreted on many levels: it is a secret message, a mysterious connective link between distant persons, hope, nostalgia, love, poetry. It is also simply a butterfly, a purely coincidental presence that is as meaningless, and eventually as nonexistent, as the waitress's casual comments indicate. This mixture of the real and the imaginary, of tenuous and unironic hope and ironic deflation, is the essential tenor of Montale's poetry from the very first. "Farfalla di Dinard" can therefore be read as a sort of summation in miniature of a poetics centering around a search for some tangible, sure reality to which emotions and images can be attached.

The reality in question is that of the butterfly itself, which might be "lá farfalla," or "the butterfly" (Montale's italics); the search is posited in clearly defined terms of yes and no. The narrator calls the problem "il punto da risolvere" (the point to be resolved). This point concerning the butterfly's existence is related to other points in Montale's poetry: "Ricerco invano il punto onde si mosse / il sangue che ti nutre" (I search in vain for the point whence was moved / the blood that nourishes you); "Una tabula rasa; se non fosse / che un punto c'era, per me incomprensibile, / e questo punto ti riguardava" (A tabula rasa; if it weren't / for the fact that there was a point, incomprehensible for me, / and this point had to do with you); "A un soffio il pigro fumo trasalisce, / si difende nel punto che ti chiude" (At a puff the lazy smoke quivers, / but persists at the point that hides you), of which Montale wrote in a letter to Bobi Bazlen, "It is clear that at the point can have two meanings: at the moment in which and place in which, both legitimate. For Landolfi, this doubt is horrible; for me it is a richness." In the recent poem "A questo punto" ("At This Point") in Diario del'71 the phrase "a questo punto smetti" (at this point stop) is repeated three times and then resolved in the final lines, "A questo punto / guarda can i tuoi occhi e anche senz'occhi" (At this point / look with your own eyes and even without eyes). Certainly not all of these usages of the word are identical, but they are all joined by their essentiality, their use as a term of either temporal or spatial quidity or as the desired resolution of some tension or doubt. But the point cannot be resolved in the story; an unequivocal answer is not possible, perhaps because the butterfly exists only for Montale, perhaps because it flew away before the waitress could note its presence. Its very existence is put in doubt, and the essential question of the meaning of its presence is thus vitiated and rendered unanswerable.

As Segre points out in his article, Farfalla di Dinard as a collection provides us with "a precious hermeneutical instrument" in our comprehension of Montale's poetry, in part because the "motive-occasion" for what will eventually be elaborated into poetry is almost always explicitly given in the stories. In the title story we are told about the butterfly and its importance to the poet in an open manner that helps us determine its symbolic significance in the less accessible poems. This is the only kind of biography that can provide meaningful illumination of the poetry. In his explanation of the "Motet" that begins "La speranza di pure rivederti" (The hope of even seeing you again), Montale also provides some information as to the autobiographical origins of the highly elusive series. He was forced to do so given the erroneous critical attempts to explain so many elements in the poems, especially the "two jackals on a leash" of the above mentioned "Motet." The jackals that Montale actually saw in Modena he experienced as "an emblem, an occult citation, a senhal," just as the butterfly of the story is felt to be an omen, the immediate reason for such a reaction being the fact that "Clizia loved odd animals." Montale bewails the "mental torpidity" of critics not because they did not come up with the correct explanation of the "Motet" but because they asked the wrong questions. He admits that there may have been too much "concentration" in his poetic rendering of the experience but counters:

In the face of this poem criticism acts like that visitor at an art show who, looking at two paintings, for example a still life of mushrooms or a landscape with a man who is walking along holding an open umbrella, might ask himself: How much do those mushrooms cost per kilo? Were they gathered by the painter or bought at the market? Where is that man going? What's his name? Is the umbrella made of real silk or a synthetic?

Montale concludes the article arguing for a juste milieu between understanding nothing and understanding too much, for "on either side of this mean there is no salvation for poetry or for criticism."

Taking off from this defense of the so-called obscure "Motet" Claire Huffman asked Montale if the reader must "limit his response to the poems to the connotative and Montalian levels of poetic meaning, or is there a middle ground? Can one assign a referential value to the 'ideological phantasmata,' and perhaps even to the 'facts, situations and things' of the poetry?" Montale answers that "an explanation is always possible as long as one does not go as far as chronicle. (Who was Clizia? Who was the Fox? Who was the girl of "After a Flight"?) I myself could not say, since they were transformed unbeknownst to them" ["Eugenio Montale: Questions, Answers, and Contexts," in Yearbook of Italian Studies (1973-1975)]. The point is to ask questions pertinent to the poetry and not to the satisfaction of extraliterary curiosity concerning the life of the poet. In this sense "Butterfly of Dinard" provides us with essential directives in our approach to the poetry, for the disappearance of the butterfly—of the real, seen butterfly, that is—is inevitable and even necessary to its elaboration into poetic symbol. The butterfly, Clizia, the Fox, even Mosca are all part of a stylistic adventure; and although they, like unnumerable other figures, places, and occurrences in the poems, were no doubt real and directly experienced, they all took flight away from chronicle and toward the realm of a lyrical existence. This is an opposite, although not opposing movement from the one described in "Tornare alla strada": there art was seen as feeding back into life; here, life feeds into art. The space of conjunction must be understood as betwixt and between the two, in that zone in which both the radical disjunctions and the vital links between life and art can be sought out, expressed, and nourished.

Montale's Nobel Prize speech "É ancora possible la poesia?" ("Is Poetry Still Possible?") was made on December 12, 1975. It is a curious piece, lacking the organized and cohesive quality of so much of Montale's critical writing. This can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that it was written in some haste and in the emotion of the moment. The poet writes in it that he had thought of entitling the talk "Will Poetry Be Able to Survive in the Universe of Mass Media?" and this interest in the world of today with its plethora of mass media is evident throughout the speech. But it also looks back to the poetry of the past and to Montale's conception of the origins of poetry.

Montale begins with the assertion that the world may soon experience "a historic shift of colossal proportions." This change, he insists, will signal not the end of man but rather the end of communal and social systems as we know them. What the result of such a change will be for mankind is not clear, although Montale suggests that the "ageold diatribe as to the meaning of life" may well cease, at least for a few centuries. He does not develop these thoughts any further, being "neither a philosopher, sociologist, nor moralist." He turns rather to his own area of competence: poetry, "an absolutely useless product, but scarcely ever harmful and this is one of its claims to nobility." In response to the judgment of his own production as being meager, he counters that "fortunately poetry is not merchandise." But what is it then? Originally it was the result of the desire to join a vocal sound to the beat of primitive music; "only much later could words and music be written down in some way and distinguished one from the other." So poetry is first sound; then it becomes visual, with "its formal schemes" having much to do with its "visibility." After the invention of printed books poetry can be defined as that which is "vertical" and does not fill up all the "blank space" (as Montale insists, "even certain empty spaces have a value"), unlike prose, which fills up all the space of a page and gives no indications as to its "pronounceability." Around the end of the nineteenth century the established forms of poetry no longer satisfied either the eye or the ear, and the crisis of form began, extending into all of the arts. Montale wonders what "rebirth or resurrection" might arise out of the so-called death of art, art that has become "consumer items, to be used and then thrown away."

The next section of the talk begins with a critique of the negative effect the contemporary attitudes of despair, confusion, and immediate gratification have had on art, which today, Montale asserts, has become "a show … that performs a kind of psychic massages on the spectator or listener or reader." This art is "sterile" ' and shows "a tremendous lack of trust in life." What can be the place of poetry, "the most discreet of the arts … the fruit of solitude and of accumulation?" Poetry has kept up with the times, insisting on its purely visual or purely auditory nature; it has also broken down the old barriers between itself and prose. Montale insists that there are innumerable roads open to this "mainstream" poetry but that it will no doubt be ephemeral, producing few works that will survive the test of time. There will also be created an art, however, that is "control and reflection," a marginal art that "refuses with horror the term production; that art that rises up almost by a miracle and seems to fix an entire epoch and an entire linguistic and cultural situation." This poetry will be capable of surviving its own time and even of returning many years after its birth to influence the art of the future.

Montale next cites a poem by Du Bellay that found in Walter Pater its interpreter, and thus in a certain sense its life, centuries after its composition, proving that "great poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but it will always remain one of the highest accomplishments of the human spirit." The poet concludes that many contemporary books of poetry "might endure through time," yet there is still the question of what that endurance will mean. Will these books be able to bring anything meaningful to the future? The answer not only for poetry but for all art is directly tied to "the human condition." For Montale the destiny of art must be seen as analogous to the destiny of mankind, the ultimate question remaining whether "the people of tomorrow … will be able to resolve the tragic contradictions with which we have struggled from the very first day of Creation."

This speech is disturbing and unsatisfactory in many ways: first because it shows Montale at his most querulously conservative; second because it raises questions and issues that are not answered in any truly illuminating manner. It is clear that Montale does not like contemporary experiments in art, which he considers for the most part to be empty and self-indulgent. This is certainly his prerogative. I take issue not with his view but rather with the way in which he presents it. Either a satiric or parodic portrait of the contemporary artist or a full-fledged, developed critique would have been much more effective. What we have instead are potshots—brief sallies and equally swift retreats from the subject at hand. For example, Montale speaks of the "portrait of a mongoloid" on display in an art show, "a subject très dégoutant," and even more so when it was discovered to be not "a portrait at all, but the unfortunate one in the flesh." The poet ironically comments, "But why not? Art can justify anything." The poet also criticizes contemporary music that is "solely noisy and repetitive" and appeals to young people who "come together in order to exorcise the horror of their solitude." These examples of the degradation of art are the kind that bring knowing and even complacent nods of recognition and agreement from certain members of the audience but that do not push the implications of their assertion far enough. Why should we refuse to accept such portraits and such music as art? The ironic "art can justify everything" means its opposite of course; but if art does not justify anything and everything, who determines its limits, who polices its borders? If experimentation is disallowed, might not the very vitality of art be destroyed? In playing devil's advocate I am myself committing the very sin of which I accuse Montale in not offering answers to these and other fundamental questions raised in his speech. Yet I believe that the criticism stands: having decided to confront such vast issues as the present and future status of art and the survival of poetry in today's and tomorrow's world of mass communication, Montale ought to have equivocated less and provided more than the very general, although not untrue, conclusion that great art is always privileged and "rises up almost miraculously."

These last comments point to the essential defect of the speech. It is an example of what is atypical of Montale, both in his prose writings and his poetry: that is, an inclusive, panoramic theme and the epigrammatic, generalizing style that results. Thus the Nobel speech is a sort of negative reinforcement of that which is strong in and vital to Montale's work: the specific, the minimal, the concrete, the eccentric. The first three prose pieces I have discussed are all excellent examples of these virtues on both a thematic and a stylistic level. They all treat circumscribed topics using either fictional or discursive particulars that illustrate convincingly the issues in question. They are all brief, concise, and minimal, not in the subjects or experiences they deal with but in the presentation of them. Perhaps sensing the momentous quality attached to the Nobel speech, Montale sought to universalize his usually very particularized tone, with less than convincing results.

This criticism pertains to the last collections of poetry also; the poems in Diario and Quaderno that are least successful are those in which Montale gives in to a sententious, moralizing tone and encapsulates his thoughts in aphoristic verses. Irony and flashes of lyricism save the collections from this tendency, but in this essay such elements are missing. It is understandable that the poet should feel the push to summarize; the weight of more than sixty years as a poet and his tremendous reputation conspire toward that end. In the recent interview with Claire Huffman, Montale was asked: "What things (or questions) interest you the most? What things don't interest you at all?" He laconically answered: "Practical issues, concerning survival (material survival). The fortunes of humanity are outside my area of competence." In the speech just discussed he says he is no philosopher, no moralist. Both of these assertions are somewhat contradicted by Montale's recent poetry, his comments on his work, and the Nobel speech. I have chosen to criticize the speech in particular not because it has some sort of eminent position in Montale's prose, although I fear that many people will read it in isolation and thus assign special weight to it, but because it represents those philosophizing, moralizing stands in the late Montale that do not lead to felicitous artistic or critical products.

There are many provisional conclusions concerning Montale's prose that can be offered even after limiting the discussion to only a few examples of his fiction and critical writings. One important point is that Montale must be seen as a European writer, both as poet and critic, rather than as a regional or even an Italian one. When Ossi di seppia first appeared there was a tendency to see it as a volume that fit into a Ligurian tradition, but it was soon recognized that such an approach was much too limiting, if not erroneous. Already in the first collection Montale's ties to a much wider poetic and philosophical tradition were evident, in spite of his undeniable interest in writing of his place of birth, the sea, and the particular local landscape of which he later wrote in "Dov'era il tennis" ("Where the Tennis Court Was") in La bufera e altro: "It is strange to think that each of us has a landscape like this, event if very different, that will have to remain his own immutable landscape."

Le occasioni and La bufera made it even more evident that Montale was a cosmopolitan poet participating in a much broader tradition than simply the Italian one, a fact explicitly pointed out by the poet himself in his choice of epigraphs for these collections from Spanish, English, and French literature as well as in his mention of the French symbolists, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Keats, and others in his explications of certain of the poems contained therein. His Quaderno di traduzioni (Translation Notebook) also reveals his very active interest in the poetry of other Western traditions, as do his many pieces on poets from Valéry and Prévert to Ezra Pound, Auden, Roethke, and T. S. Eliot. The prose pieces discussed here are typical in the range of interests they reveal: German poetry in "La poesia non esiste"; travel in France in "Farfalla di Dinard"; modern painting and music in "Tornare nella strada"; contemporary art in "É ancora possible la poesia?" Even more so than in the poetry it is in the prose that we see the eclectic and wide-ranging culture of Montale, which inevitably feeds his verses and gives his work a frame of reference far beyond the confines of Italy. The Italian lyric tradition is of course an extremely rich and varied one, ranging from Dante to Petrarch to the Baroque poets to Leopardi and the great triumvirate of Carducci, Pascoli, and D'Annunzio, not to mention the moderns—futurists, crepuscularists, hermeticists, and so on. I am not suggesting that Montale has divorced himself from this tradition or that he did not make use of it in elaborating his own poetry. But what is so clearly evident, especially in his autobiographical, fictional, and critical writings, is his assimilation of other linguistic, literary, and cultural materials and his constant view of artistic activity as transcending national boundaries.

This cosmopolitan orientation is no doubt motivated in part by temperament and purely personal tastes. In a general sense Montale's recourse to other traditions and cultures is also tied to what he has called "an unfittedness … a maladjustment both psychological and moral" that from the first made him feel in disharmony with his immediate environment. In a more specific sense we can see in his view of the Italian language another source of discontent, for he says of it, "I wanted to wring the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language," using interestingly enough a Verlainian turn of phrase. He further comments on his attitude toward Italian that "in the new book [Occasions] I continued my battle to dig out another dimension from our heavy polysyllabic language, a language that seemed to me to refuse an experience such as mine … I have often cursed our language, but in it and through it I came to recognize myself as incurably Italian: and without regrets." Here is evident a combative resistance to Italian, Montale's native language, as well as a final capitulation without regrets to its inevitable hegemony.

A humorous piece included in the collection Farfalla di Dinard reveals Montale's rather shamefaced admiration of the English style. I say "shamefaced" because the selfparody is rampant, and yet the very real attachment to such a style is equally evident. The story is entitled "Signore inglese" ("English Gentleman"), and this gentleman practices a new sport: that of being a "fake Englishman." He does this in Switzerland because an Englishman in England is nothing special and because he needs a neutral space in which to carry out his fiction. Montale writes that he has been trying for years to emulate the man but without success. What follows is a merciless depiction of English habits: the renunciation of any athletic activities, the daily consumption of tea and cakes, the maintenance of a stoic silence broken only by some chiú (a clipped "thank you") if anyone should speak to him or do him some small service. Montale concludes that "in an imaginary club of fake Englishmen the presidency would be his and the vice-presidency would be mine." The story is entirely humourous but it has its origins in the poet's real fascination with and admiration for the laconic, absolutely un-Mediterranean English style.

If Montale can be associated with a European perspective, it is very much an old-world one—that is, of a culture and style particular to the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century intellectual. The new world, America, held great interest for many Italian writers of the thirties and forties, especially Cesare Pavese, and that interest resulted in the translation of American classics, in travel books, and in the general elaboration of a myth of America. Although Montale translated some American literature, both prose and poetry, and spent a few days in New York, he never shared this American fever, a fact entirely consonant with his conservative and deeply old-world character. The world and culture in which he feels most at home are those of the people evoked in the poem "Lettera" ("Letter") in Satura: "i veri e i degni avant le déluge" (the true and the deserving avant le déluge). This may seem at odds with his modernity as a poet, but I do not believe that we must see a contradiction here, for his conservation has always been tempered with a most acute awareness of the present moment. Montale does not express a belief in the superiority of the good old days but rather points to and seconds certain fundamental values and styles as timeless and therefore universally valid. His distrust of and even disdain for contemporary manifestations of power, immediacy, speed, and self-gratification show by contrast his sustained belief in the minor virtues of patience, painstaking care in and dedication to one's craft, awareness of one's limits, and daily decency. There is undeniably a bit of the snob in Montale, but he has never sought to hide this facet of his personality. His prose works display his European, cosmopolitan, conservative, and even slightly aristocratic tastes and interests. In them we see a mind that has certain affinites with the poetic genius behind the collections of verse; we also learn much from them of the man behind the hermetic, ironic poetic I.

In his fictional-autobiographical prose in the collections Farfalla di Dinard and Fuori di casa Montale reveals his penchant for sature, irony, and humor, a voice that is fully developed poetically in the latest poems. In his journalistic and critical writings he shows his constant involvement in the past, present, and future of art in the Western world. It is clear that his greatness lies in his poetry, for although he is an accomplished raconteur and a perceptive critic, he is not exceptionally gifted as either. This is understandable, for sustained and rich prose demands a synthetic vision of a believed and believable reality—not realism necessarily but the ability to build a complete world. Montale's description of the stories of Farfalla as "culsde-lampe" (vignettes) is apt. They are occasioni, more discursively presented than in the poems of course but nonetheless brief and sketchy pieces that find their total meaning in their collectivity and in their interrelationship with the poetry they directly or indirectly gloss. The poet's critical writings also tend toward the sketch, the single insight, the unsystematic presentation of the opinions and insights of a cultivated but not especially privileged reader of both texts and events. This emphasis on the seemingly minimal in both his poetry and prose is perhaps the most essential aspect of the Montalian voice. Thematically, stylistically, and philosophically his writing is the expression of a long dedication to the value, and indeed necessity, of what is individual and unique in both art and life. For Montale, if poetry is still possible it is because it is born, lives, dies, and is born again through wars, great social, cultural, and even spiritual upheavals, not as an essential issue or as a force for change and final revelation but as "an entity of which we know very little." This phrase could well be applied to the human race itself, so convinced are we of our central and superior position, "our certainty or illusion of believing ourselves to be privileged," when in fact our salvation, and poetry's, lies instead in the courageous recognition of how minimal is our self-knowledge, how deeply marginal and inevitably ambiguous is that which we seek to make essential and unequivocal: our own existence.