Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale lived through two world wars, the birth of Fascism
and its twenty years in power, the high expectations and disillusions of
the aftermath of World War Two, fifty years of Christian Democrat
government and its countless declared or undeclared associations with the
Communist Party, their final failure, the aborted revolution of the
seventies, terrorism and restoration. He was a poet and he died a decent
man. Montale kept clear of political power and distanced himself from all
regimes: a declared choice, a clear censure, a bitter denunciation.
Montale's poetry is a minimal chant, intimate and vital; it speaks of time
and space, it calls up infinity and evokes eternity through the colours,
the light and the simple details of everyday images. To listen is easy, to
feel and understand it is also easy. Literal comprehension is a useless
exercise for annotators: the poet's obscurity is the reader's liberty. A
constant implicit theme in his poetry is relating our life to the life of
the universe. Montale published "Satura" in 1971 and in 1973 "Trentadue
variazioni" and the "Diary of '71 and '72". In 1975 he is awarded the
Nobel Prize for literature that acknowledges him as a free man and a free
poet. In 1977 the "Notebook of Four Years" (Quaderno di quattro anni) was
published.
Read Letter to Malvolio, a poem by Eugenio Montale.
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