Early years Montale was born in
Genoa, the son of Giuseppina Ricci and Domenico Montale, a businessman who ran a chemical products company. Montale was the youngest of six children, including five brothers and a sister. Montale attended elementary school in Genoa. The Montale family spent their summers at their villa in
Monterosso al Mare, and the landscapes of the
Ligurian region would go on to inspire his poetry. In 1911, he was enrolled at a technical college and graduated with a diploma in accountancy in 1915. Montale was largely self-taught. Growing up, his imagination was caught by several writers, including
Dante Alighieri, and by the study of foreign languages (especially English).
Poetic works Montale wrote more than ten anthologies of short lyrics, a journal of poetry translation, plus several books of prose translations, two books of literary criticism, and one of fantasy prose. Alongside his imaginative work he was a constant contributor to Italy's most important newspaper, the
Corriere della Sera, for which he wrote a huge number of articles on literature, music, and art. He also wrote a foreword to Dante's "The Divine Comedy", in which he mentions the credibility of Dante, and his insight and unbiased imagination. In 1925 he was a signatory to the
Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals. Montale's own politics inclined toward the liberalism of
Piero Gobetti and
Benedetto Croce. He contributed to Gobetti's literary magazine
Il Baretti. Montale's work, especially his first poetry collection
Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones"), which appeared in 1925, shows him as an antifascist who felt detached from contemporary life and found solace and refuge in the solitude of nature.
Anticonformism of the new poetry Montale moved to
Florence in 1927 to work as an editor for the publisher
Bemporad. Florence was the cradle of Italian poetry of that age, with works like the
Canti orfici by
Dino Campana (1914) and the first lyrics by
Ungaretti for the review
Lacerba. Other poets like
Umberto Saba and
Vincenzo Cardarelli had been highly praised. In 1929 Montale was asked to be chairman of the
Gabinetto Vieusseux Library, a post from which he was expelled in 1938 by the fascist government. By this time Montale's poetry was a reaction against the literary style of the fascist regime. He collaborated with the magazine
Solaria, and (starting in 1927) frequented the literary café Le
Giubbe Rosse ("Red Jackets") on the
Piazza Vittoria (now Piazza della Repubblica). Visiting the café often several times a day, he became a central figure among a group of writers there, including
Carlo Emilio Gadda,
Arturo Loria and
Elio Vittorini (all founders of the magazine). He wrote for almost all the important literary magazines of the time. Though hindered by financial problems and the literary and social conformism imposed by the authorities, in Florence, Montale published his finest anthology,
Le occasioni ("Occasions", 1939). From 1933 to 1938 he had a love relationship with
Irma Brandeis, a Jewish-American scholar of Dante who occasionally visited Italy for short periods. After falling in love with Brandeis, Montale represented her as a
mediatrix figure like Dante's
Beatrice.
Le occasioni contains numerous allusions to Brandeis, here called Clizia (a
senhal).
Franco Fortini judged Montale's
Ossi di seppia and
Le occasioni the high-water mark of 20th century
Italian poetry.
T.S. Eliot, who shared Montale's admiration for Dante, was an important influence on his poetry at this time; in fact, the new poems of Eliot were shown to Montale by
Mario Praz, then teaching in Manchester. The concept of the
objective correlative used by Montale in his poetry, was probably influenced by T. S. Eliot. In 1948, for Eliot's sixtieth birthday, Montale contributed a celebratory essay entitled "Eliot and Ourselves" to a collection published to mark the occasion.
Disharmony with the world From 1948 to his death, Montale lived in Milan. After the war, he was a member of the liberal
Partito d'Azione. As a contributor to the
Corriere della Sera he was music editor and also reported from abroad, including Israel, where he went as a reporter to follow
Pope Paul VI's visit there. His works as a journalist are collected in
Fuori di casa ("Out of Home", 1969).
La bufera e altro ("The Storm and Other Things") was published in 1956 and marks the end of Montale's most acclaimed poetry. Here his figure Clizia is joined by La Volpe ("the Fox"), based on the young poet
Maria Luisa Spaziani with whom Montale had an affair during the 1950s. However, this volume also features Clizia, treated in a variety of poems as a kind of bird-goddess who defies Hitler. These are some of his greatest poems. His later works are
Xenia (1966),
Satura (1971) and ''
Diario del '71 e del '72'' (1973). Montale's later poetry is wry and ironic, musing on the critical reaction to his earlier work and on the constantly changing world around him.
Satura contains a poignant elegy to his wife
Drusilla Tanzi. He also wrote a series of poignant poems about Clizia shortly before his death. Montale's fame at that point had extended throughout the world. He had received honorary degrees from the Universities of Milan (1961),
Cambridge (1967),
Rome (1974), and had been named
Senator-for-Life in the Italian Senate. In 1973 he was awarded the
Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in
Struga,
SR Macedonia. In 1975 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Montale died in Milan in 1981.
Joseph Brodsky dedicated his essay "In the Shadow of Dante" to Eugenio Montale's lyric poetry. ==List of works==