ABSTRACT
Eugenio Montale's poetry of tenacious resistance and opposition is replaced by the poetry of impotent protest, a protest from within the society and the intellectual class so unflatteringly represented. Images of isolation, of withdrawal and of mere survival are the only means by which the poetic io can assert his difference, his tenuous integrity in the face of a debased public life. While Montale vigorously condemns the inauthenticity that surrounds him, he is equally uncompromising in his attitude to his own poetic persona, whose contradictions and limitations he repeatedly exposes. While most poems have no specific setting, the predominance of the domestic scene among those that do tends clearly to establish this as the spatial focus of Diario and Quaderno. From Diario onwards, Montale's apartment in via Bigli in Milan becomes the key physical space in his poetry, as the poetic voice speaks almost exclusively from within the clearly delineated and physically restricting boundaries of the home.
