Montale, Eugenio

(1896–1981)

   One of the greatest 20th century poets, Eugenio Montale became the fifth Italian in that century to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Montale established his reputation in 1925 when the antifascist publisher and political theorist Piero Gobetti printed his remarkable collection Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones). Along with Eliot’s Wasteland (which Montale translated into Italian), the poems in Ossi di seppia are perhaps the most poignant expression of the malaise experienced by the generation who had survived World War I. Spare in style, self-consciously rejecting the pompous, rhetorical forms popularized by Gabriele d’Annunzio, they also refused to make any concessions to the ardent, committed poetry prized by Fascism. Montale “discovered” Italo Svevo in a famous essay in 1925, and as one of the principal figures connected with the literary magazine Solaria, he played an important role in preserving independent Italian literature during the dictatorship. His relations with the regime were never easy, and in 1939 his refusal to swear allegiance to Benito Mussolini led to his losing his job at a Florentine literary foundation. In the same year, he published his second great collection of poems, Le occasioni (Occasions).

   After World War II, Montale worked as a cultural and music critic (his collected short essays and criticism were published in Italy in 1996) for Corriere della sera and produced a masterful collection of poems, Il Bufera e altri (The Storm and Others) in 1956. The death of his wife in 1963 inspired him to write a series of lyric poems that were later collected in Saturna (1971).

   Honors were showered on Montale in his last years. He became a life member of the Italian Senate in 1967 and, in 1975, became a Nobel laureate for literature. He died in Milan in September 1981.