ABSTRACT
Eugenio Montale is Italy's greatest modern poet, and belongs with the generation that came to public notice just before and after the First World War. Montale in real life was a soldier, a senator in Italy's Parliament, a would-be singer of bel canto. There is the violence that is psychological, costive or pinched, and sometimes Montale, fishing the dull canal behind the gashouse, betrays it. Montale, like those "Crepuscolari" or twilight poets, repudiates the fictive order of boxwood and acanthus, fabricated by "the poets laureate", a derisive appellation. Montale in the Waste Land keeps his solicitude and his memory inviolate. In poetry, not only Montale's, general statements are uninteresting in and for themselves. Montale succeeds, not as he is philosophically persuasive, rather as his poetry, some of it anyway, makes a memorable coherence. Montale's style embodies problems personal to him, and laying them out is the function of criticism.
