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Eliot & Montale

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go” T.S. Eliot

Poetry, Poems, Bios & Morepoets.org Poetry, Poems, Bios & Morepoets.org Lost Generation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org American literature: The Lost Generation and After — Infoplease.cominfoplease.com T.S. Eliot - Biographynobelprize.org Eugenio Montale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaen.wikipedia.org Il Pendolo (Rivista trimestrale gratuita a cura del Circolo letterario Bel-Ami) » Letteratura » La poesia di Eliot e Montale fra modernismo e metafisicailpendolo.info

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Poetry, Poems, Bios & More poets.org

“That’s not it at all, that’s not what I meant at all”from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T. S. Eliot

Modernism The English novelist Virginia Woolf declared that human nature underwent a fundamental change “on or about December 1910.” The statement testifies to the modern writer’s fervent desire to break with the past, rejecting literary traditions that seemed outmoded and diction that seemed too genteel to suit an era of technological breakthroughs and global violence. “On or about 1910,” just as the automobile and airplane were beginning to accelerate the pace of human life, and Einstein’s ideas were transforming our perception of the universe, there was an explosion of innovation and creative energy that shook every field of artistic endeavor. Artists from all over the world converged on London, Paris, and other great cities of Europe to join in the ferment of new ideas and movements: Cubism, Constructivism, Futurism, Acmeism, and Imagism were among the most influential banners under which the new artists grouped themselves. It was an era when major artists were fundamentally questioning and reinventing their art forms: Matisse and Picasso in painting, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in literature, Isadora Duncan in dance, Igor Stravinsky in music, and Frank Lloyd Wright in architecture. The excitement, however, came to a terrible climax in 1914 with the start of the First World War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe, catapulted Russia into a catastrophic revolution, and sowed the seeds for even worse conflagrations in the decades to follow. By the war’s end in 1918, the centuries-old European domination of the world had ended and the “American Century” had begun. For artists and many others in Europe, it was a time of profound disillusion with the values on which a whole civilization had been founded. But it was also a time when the avante-garde experiments that had preceded the war would, like the technological wonders of the airplane and the atom, inexorably establish a new dispensation, which we call modernism. Among the most instrumental of all artists in effecting this change were a handful of American poets. Ezra Pound, the most aggressively modern of these poets, made “Make it new!” his battle cry. In London Pound encountered and encouraged his fellow expatriate T. S. Eliot, who wrote what is arguably the most famous poem of the twentieth century—The Waste Land—using revolutionary techniques of composition, such as the collage. Both poets turned to untraditional sources for inspiration, Pound to classical Chinese poetry and Eliot to the ironic poems of the 19th century French symbolist poet Jules Laforgue. H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) followed Pound to Europe and wrote poems that, in their extreme concision and precise visualization, most purely embodied his famous doctrine of imagism. Among the American poets who stayed at home, Wallace Stevens—a mild-mannered executive at a major insurance firm in Hartford, Connecticut—had a flair for the flashiest titles that poems have ever had: “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.” Stevens, the aesthete par excellence, exalted the imagination for its ability to “press back against the pressure of reality.” What was new in Marianne Moore was her brilliant and utterly original use of quotations in her poetry, and her surpassing attention to the poetic image. What was new in E. E. Cummings was right on the surface, where all the words were in lower-case letters and a parenthesis “(a leaf falls)” may separate the “l” from “oneliness.”

William Carlos Williams wrote in “plain American which cats and dogs can read,” to use a phrase of Marianne Moore. “No ideas but in things,” he proclaimed. In succinct, often witty poems he presents common objects or events—a red wheelbarrow, a person eating plums—with freshness and immediacy, enlarging our understanding of what a poem’s subject matter can be. Unlike Williams, Robert Frost favored traditional devices—blank verse, rhyme, narrative, the sonnet form—but he, too, had a genius for the American vernacular, and his pitiless depiction of a cruel natural universe marks him as a peculiarly modern figure who is sometimes misread as a genial Yankee sage. Of the many modern poets who acted on the ambition to write a long poem capable of encompassing an entire era, Hart Crane was one of the more notably successful. In his poem “The Bridge,” the Brooklyn Bridge is both a symbol of the new world and a metaphor allowing the poet to cross into different periods, where he may shake hands in the past with Walt Whitman and watch as the train called the Twentieth Century races into the future. poets.org

Poetry, Poems, Bios & More poets.org In a Station of the Metro

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.”Ezra Pound

ImagismThe Imagist movement included English and American poets in the early twentieth century who wrote free verse and were devoted to “clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.” A strand of modernism, Imagism was officially launched in 1912 when Ezra Pound read and marked up a poem by Hilda Doolittle, signed it “H.D. Imagiste,” and sent it to Harriet Monroe at Poetry. The movement sprang from ideas developed by T.E. Hulme, who as early as 1908 was proposing to the Poets’ Club in London a poetry based on absolutely accurate presentation of its subject with no excess verbiage. The first tenet of the Imagist manifesto was “To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.” Imagism was a reaction against the flabby abstract language and “careless thinking” of Georgian Romanticism. Imagist poetry aimed to replace muddy abstractions with exactness of observed detail, apt metaphors, and economy of language. For example, Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” started from a glimpse of beautiful faces in a dark subway and elevated that perception into a crisp vision by finding an intensified equivalent image. The metaphor provokes a sharp, intuitive discovery in order to get at the essence of life. Pound’s definition of the image was “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.” Pound defined the tenets of Imagist poetry as: I. Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective. II. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. III. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. An Imagist anthology was published in 1914 that collected work by William Carlos Williams, Richard Aldington, and James Joyce, as well as H.D. and Pound. Other imagists included F. S. Flint, D. H. Lawrence, and John Gould Fletcher. By the time the anthology appeared, Amy Lowell had effectively appropriated Imagism and was seen as the movement’s leader. Three years later, even Amy Lowell thought the movement had run its course. Pound by then was claiming that he invented Imagism to launch H.D.’s career. Though Imagism as a movement was over by 1917, the ideas about poetry embedded in the Imagist doctrine profoundly influenced free verse poets throughout the twentieth century. poets.org

Lost Generation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia en.wikipedia.org

The “Lost Generation” is a term used to refer to the generation, actually a cohort, that came of age during World War I. The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, The Sun Also Rises. In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron. In A Moveable Feast, which was published after Hemingway and Stein were both dead and after a literary feud that lasted much of their life, Hemingway reveals that the phrase was actually originated by the garage owner who serviced Stein’s car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car in a way satisfactory to Stein, the garage owner shouted at the boy, “You are all a “génération perdue.” Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, added, “That is what you are. That’s what you all are … all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.” This generation included distinguished artists such as F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, Waldo Peirce, Alan Seeger, and Erich Maria Remarque. In literature

Gertrude Stein with Ernest Hemingway’s son, Jack Hemingway (nicknamed Bumby) in 1924. Stein is credited with bringing the term “Lost Generation” into use. The term originated with Gertrude Stein who, after being unimpressed by the skills of a young car mechanic, asked the garage owner where the young man had been trained. The garage owner told her that while young men were easy to train, it was those in their mid-twenties to thirties, the men who had been through World War I, whom he considered a “lost generation” — une génération perdue. The 1926 publication of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises popularized the term, as Hemingway used it as an epigraph. The novel serves to epitomize the post-war expatriate generation. However, Hemingway himself later wrote to his editor Max Perkins that the “point of the book” was not so much about a generation being lost, but that “the earth abideth forever”; he believed the characters in The Sun Also Rises may have been “battered” but were not lost. In his memoir A Moveable Feast, published after his death, he writes “I tried to balance Miss Stein’s quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes.” A few lines later, recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds: “I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought ‘who is calling who a lost generation?’” Other uses

Variously, the term is used for the period from the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression, though in the United States it is used for the generation of young people who came of age during and shortly after World War I, alternatively known as the World War I generation. Authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, well known for their generational theory, define the Lost Generation as the cohorts born from 1883 to 1900, who came of age during World War I and the roaring twenties. In Europe, they are mostly known as the “Generation of 1914,” for the year World War I began. In France, the country in which many expatriates settled, they were sometimes called the Génération au Feu, the “generation in flames.” In Britain the term was originally used for those who died in the war, and often implicitly referred to upper-class casualties who were perceived to have died disproportionately, robbing the country of a future elite. Many felt “that ‘the flower of youth’ and the ‘best of the nation’ had been

destroyed,” for example such notable casualties as the poets Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen, composer George Butterworth and physicist Henry Moseley. In the late-2000s recession, the phrase is often used when discussing the high level of youth unemployment. Notes ^ a b Hemingway 1996, p. 29 ^ Mellow 1991, p. 273 ^ Mellow 1992, p. 302 ^ Baker 1972, p. 82 ^ Hemingway 1996, p. 29-30 ^ Howe, Neil; Strauss, William (1991). Generations: The History of Americas Future. 1584 to 2069. New York: William Morrow and Company. pp. 247–260. ISBN 0-688-11912-3.  ^ Wohl, Robert (1979). The generation of 1914 . Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-34466-2. http://books.google.com/books?id=YLe3e3FDXQkC&lpg=PA1&dq=wohl%201914&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q=&f=false.  ^ “The Lost Generation: the myth and the reality”. Aftermath - when the boys came home. http://www.aftermathww1.com/lostgen.asp. Retrieved 6 November 2009.  ^ J. M. Winter (November 1977). “Britain’s ‘Lost Generation’ of the First World War”. Population Studies 31 (3): 449-466. http://www.jstor.org/pss/2173368.  ^ “What was the ‘lost generation’?”. Schools Online World War One. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/worldwarone/hq/outcomes1_03.shtml. Retrieved 22 March 2012.  ^ Blastland, Michael (17 February 2011). “The youth unemployment mystery”. Go Figure. BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12480633. Retrieved 1 April 2012.  Sources Meyers, Jeffrey (1985). Hemingway: A Biography. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-42126-4.  Hemingway, Ernest (1996). A Movable Feast. New York: Scribner. ISBN 0-684-82499-X.  Mellow, James R. (1992). Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-37777-3.  Mellow, James R. (1991). Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-47982-7.  Further reading Fitch, Noel Riley. Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. (1985) Norton. Mellow, James R. (1991). Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company. New York: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-47982-7.  Categories: Literary movements Cultural generations Aftermath of World War I Roaring Twenties en.wikipedia.org

American literature: The Lost Generation and After — Infoplease.com infoplease.com

  The Lost Generation and After

The years immediately after World War I brought a highly vocal rebellion against established social, sexual, and aesthetic conventions and a vigorous attempt to establish new values. Young artists flocked to Greenwich Village, Chicago, and San Francisco, determined to protest and intent on making a new art. Others went to Europe, living mostly in Paris as expatriates. They willingly accepted the name given them by Gertrude Stein: the lost generation. Out of their disillusion and rejection, the writers built a new literature, impressive in the glittering 1920s and the years that followed. Romantic clichés were abandoned for extreme realism or for complex symbolism and created myth. Language grew so frank that there were bitter quarrels over censorship, as in the troubles about James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen (1919) and—much more notably—Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (1931). The influences of new psychology and of Marxian social theory were also very strong. Out of this highly active boiling of new ideas and new forms came writers of recognizable stature in the world, among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and E. E. Cummings. Eugene O’Neill came to be widely considered the greatest of the dramatists the United States has produced. Other writers also enriched the theater with comedies, social reform plays, and historical tragedies. Among them were Maxwell Anderson, Philip Barry, Elmer Rice, S. N. Behrman, Marc Connelly, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Thornton Wilder. The social drama and the symbolic play were further developed by Arthur Miller, William Inge, and Tennessee Williams. By the 1960s the influence of foreign movements was much felt with the development of “off-Broadway” theater. One of the new playwrights who gained special notice at the time was Edward Albee, whose later works again attracted attention in the 1990s. Important playwrights of recent decades who have imbued the modern world with qualities ranging from menace to a kind of grace in their surreal or hyper-real works include Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Tony Kushner. The naturalism that governed the novels of Dreiser and the stories of Sherwood Anderson was intensified by the stories of the Chicago slums by James T. Farrell and later Nelson Algren. Violence in language and in action was extreme in some of the novels of World War II, notably those of James Jones and Norman Mailer. Not unexpectedly, after World War I, black writers came forward, casting off the sweet melodies of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and speaking of social oppression and pervasive prejudice. Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes in the 1920s and 30s were succeeded by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) in the 1940s and 50s. Poetry after World War I was largely dominated by T. S. Eliot and his followers, who imposed intellectuality and a new sort of classical form that had been urged by his fellow expatriate Ezra Pound. Eliot was also highly influential as a literary critic and contributed to making the period 1920–60 one that was to some extent dominated by literary analysts and promoters of various warring schools. Among those critics were H. L. Mencken, Edmund Wilson, Lewis Mumford, Malcolm Cowley, Van Wyck Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Yvor Winters, Lionel Trilling, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. The victories of the new over the old in the 1920s did not mean the disappearance of the older ideals of form even among lovers of the new. Much that was traditional lived on in the lyrics of Conrad Aiken, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Elinor Wylie. In the later years of the period two poets of unusual subtlety and complexity gained world recognition, though they had been quietly

writing long before: Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. The admirable novels of Willa Cather did not resort to new devices; the essays of E. B. White were models of pure style, as were the stories of Katherine Anne Porter and Jean Stafford. In this period humor left far behind the broadness of George Ade’s Fables (1899) for the acrid satire of Ring Lardner and the highly polished style of Robert Benchley and James Thurber. The South still produced superb writers, notably Carson McCullers, Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, whose works, while often grotesque, were also compassionate and humorous. The tension, horror, and meaninglessness of contemporary American life became a major theme of novelists during the 1960s and 70s. While authors such as Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Hortense Calisher, and Philip Roth presented the varied responses of urban intellectuals, usually Jews, and John Updike and John Cheever treated the largely Protestant middle class, William Burroughs, Joyce Carol Oates, and Raymond Carver unsparingly depicted the conflict and violence inherent in American life at all levels of society. Irony and so-called black humor were the weapons of authors like Roth, Joseph Heller, and Jules Feiffer. However, other writers, notably Donald Barthelme, Jerzy Kosinski, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., expressed their view of the world as unreal, as mad, by writing fantasies that were by turns charming, obscure, exciting, profound, and terrifying. Many of these writers have been called postmodern, but the term encompasses a number of charactistics, including multiculturalism, self-reflection, and attention to new means of communication. Although the poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti gained initial recognition as part of the beat generation, their individual reputations were soon firmly established. Writers of “perceptual verse” such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Robert Duncan became widely recognized during the 1960s. One of the most provocative and active poets of the decade was Robert Lowell, who often wrote of the anguish and corruption in modern life. His practice of revelation about his personal life evolved into so-called confessional poetry, which was also written by such poets as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and, in a sense, John Berryman. Accomplished poets with idiosyncratic styles were Elizabeth Bishop and James Dickey. To some degree, poetry has also become polarized along ideological lines, as shown in the work of feminist poet Adrienne Rich. Meanwhile, the bittersweet lyrics of James Merrill expressed the concerns of a generation. The pressure and fascination of actual events during the 1960s intrigued many writers of fiction, and Truman Capote, John Hersey, James Michener, and Norman Mailer wrote with perception and style about political conventions, murders, demonstrations, and presidential elections. Post–Vietnam War American literature has called into question many previously unchallenged assumptions about life. In addition, writing in many prose styles, such novelists as Don DeLillo, Peter Taylor, William Kennedy, Richard Ford, Robert Stone, E. Annie Proulx, and T. Coraghessen Boyle have explored a wide variety of experiences and attitudes in contemporary American society. The literature of the 1980s and 90s also encompasses the work of African-American (e.g., Nobel Prize–winner Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor), Latino (e.g., Oscar Hijuelos, Rudolfo Anaya, and Sandra Cisneros), Native American (e.g., Louise Erdrich and N. Scott Momaday), Asian-American (e.g., Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan), and homosexual (e.g., Edmund Wilson, David Leavitt, and Rita Mae Brown) writers, who previously were often excluded or ignored in mainstream literature. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. Premium Partner Content Related content from HighBeam Research on: American literature: The Lost Generation and After Scholar and exegete: a tribute to Sacvan Bercovitch, MLA honored scholar of early American literature, 2002. (Early American Literature) Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. (The American

Enterprise) Craig Monk. Writing The Lost Generation: Expatriate Autobiography and American Modernism.(Book review) (English Studies in Canada) A Mule on a Piano, Cezanne Hung Upside Down, The Lost Generation Wobbles.(Brief Article) (Newsweek International) Expatriate literature: if, indeed, you can’t go home again, why not go far, far, away?(Recommended readings) (Bookmarks) Something Every Teacher and Counselor Needs to Know about African-American Children (Multicultural Education) Interview without Warhol; two years after Warhol’s death, and 20 years after Interview’s launch, the ‘downtown’ title reshapes its identity. (Folio: the Magazine for Magazine Management) Reconciling Memories of Internment Camp Experiences During WWII in Children’s and Young Adult Literature (ALAN Review) Recovering American Literature. (The Public Interest) In a Generous Spirit: A First Person Biography of Myra Page. (The Women’s Review of Books) Additional search results provided by HighBeam Research, LLC. © Copyright 2005. All rights reserved. infoplease.com

T.S. Eliot - Biography

Prize category: Biography

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church.

Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. Never compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction has been immense. Eliot’s poetry from Prufrock (1917) to the Four Quartets (1943) reflects the development of a Christian writer: the early work, especially The Waste Land (1922), is essentially negative, the expression of that horror from which the search for a higher world arises. In Ash Wednesday (1930) and the Four Quartets this higher world becomes more visible; nonetheless Eliot has always taken care not to become a «religious poet». and often belittled the power of poetry as a religious force. However, his dramas Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) are more openly Christian apologies. In his essays, especially the later ones, Eliot advocates a traditionalism in religion, society, and literature that seems at odds with his pioneer activity as a poet. But although the Eliot of Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is an older man than the poet of The Waste Land, it should not be forgotten that for Eliot tradition is a living organism comprising past and present in constant mutual interaction. Eliot’s plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and TheElderStatesman(1959) were published in one volume in 1962; Collected Poems 1909-62 appeared in 1963. From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969 This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.   T.S. Eliot died on January 4, 1965.   Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1948 TO CITE THIS PAGE:MLA style: “T.S. Eliot - Biography”. Nobelprize.org. 17 May 2012 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1948/eliot-bio.html RELATED DOCUMENTS: ARTICLE LITERATURE The Nobel Prize in Literature

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Eugenio Montale - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org Eugenio Montale (October 12, 1896 – September 12, 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. Life and works

Early years

Montale was born in Genoa. His family were chemical products traders (his father furnished Italo Svevo’s firm). The poet’s niece, Bianca Montale, in her Cronaca famigliare (“Family Chronicle”) of 1986 portrays the family’s common characteristics as “nervous fragility, shyness, concision in speaking, a tendency to see the worst in every event, a certain sense of humour”. Montale was the youngest of six sons. He recalled: We had a large family. My brothers went to the scagno [“office” in Genoese]. My only sister had a university education, but I had not such a possibility. In many families the unspoken arrangement existed that the youngest was released from the task to keep up the family’s name. In 1915 Montale worked as an accountant, but was left free to follow his literary passion, frequenting the city’s libraries and attending his sister Marianna’s private philosophy lessons. He also studied opera singing with the baritone Ernesto Sivori. Montale was therefore a self-taught man. Growing up, his imagination was caught by several writers, including Dante Alighieri, and by studies of foreign languages (especially English), as well as the landscapes of the Levante (“Eastern”) Liguria, where he spent holidays with his family. During World War I, as a member of the Military Academy of Parma, Montale asked to be sent to the front. After a brief war experience as an infantry officer in Vallarsa and the Puster Valley, in 1920 he came back home. Poetic works Montale wrote a relatively small number of works. Four anthologies of short lyrics, a quaderno 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. Despite having written only a few works, he did however write a forward for Dante’s “The Divine Comedy” or “La Comedia Divina”. In his foreword he mentions the credibility of Dante, and his insight and unbiased imagination Montale’s work, especially in his first poetry collection Ossi di seppia (“Cuttlefish Bones”), which appeared in 1925: as an antifascist, he felt detached from contemporary life and found solace and refuge in the solitude of nature. A famous poem of Ossi di seppia ends with these two verses: Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti, ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo. (Only this is what we can tell you today, that which we are not, that which we do not want.) The Mediterranean landscape of Montale’s native Liguria was a strong presence in these early poems: they gave him a sort of “personal reclusion” in face of the depressing events around him. These poems emphasise his personal solitude and empathy with the “little” and “insignificant” things around him, or with its horizon, the sea. According to Montale, nature is “rough, scanty, dazzling”. In a world filled with defeat and despair, nature alone seemed to possess dignity, the same that the reader experiences in reading his poems.

Anticonformism of the new poetry Montale moved to Florence in 1927 to work as editor for the publisher Bemporad. Florence was the cradle of the 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 by the Florentine publishers. 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. In the meantime he collaborated to 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 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, Montale published in Florence his finest anthology, Le occasioni (“Occasions”, 1939). From 1933 to 1938 he had a deep relationship with Irma Brandeis, a Jewish-American scholar of Dante who occasionally visited Italy in short stints before returning to the United States. 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 highest point 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 Liverpool. 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 biblio-symposium published to mark the occasion. Disharmony with the world From 1948 to his death, Montale lived in Milan. As a contributor to the Corriere della Sera he was music editor and reported from abroad, including Palestine, where he went as a reporter to follow Pope Paul VI’s voyage 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 poetess 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. They are some of his greatest works. 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 works 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 by the Universities of Milan (1961), Cambridge (1967), Rome (1974), and had been named Senator-for-Life in the Italian Senate. In 1975 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in Milan in 1981. In 1996, a work appeared called Posthumous Diary (Diario postumo) that purported to have been ‘constructed’ by Montale before his death with the help of the young poet Annalisa Cima; the critic Dante Isella thinks that this work is not authentic.

Works Each year links to its corresponding “[year] in literature” or “[year] in poetry” article: 1925: Ossi di seppia (“Cuttlefish Bones”), first edition; second edition, 1928, with six new poems and an introduction by Alfredo Gargiulo; third edition, 1931, Lanciano: Carabba 1932: La casa dei doganieri e altre poesie, a chapbook of five poems published in association with the award of the Premio del Antico Fattore to Montale; Florence: Vallecchi 1939: Le occasioni (“The Occasions”), Turin: Einaudi 1943: Finisterre, a chapbook of poetry, smuggled into Switzerland by Gianfranco Contini; Lugano: the Collana di Lugano (June 24); second edition, 1945, Florence: Barbèra 1948: Quaderno di traduzioni, translations, Milan: Edizioni della Meridiana 1948: La fiera letteraria poetry criticism 1956: La bufera e altro (“The Storm and Other Things”), a first edition of 1,000 copies, Venice: Neri Pozza; second, larger edition published in 1957, Milan: Arnaldo Mondadore Editore 1956: Farfalla di Dinard, stories, a private edition 1962: Satura, poetry, published in a private edition, Verona: Oficina Bodoni 1962: Accordi e pastelli (“Agreements and Pastels”), Milan: Scheiwiller (May) 1966: Il colpevole 1966: Auto da fé: Cronache in due tempi, cultural criticism, Milan: Il Saggiatore 1966: Xenia, poems in memory of Mosca, first published in a private edition of 50 1969: Fuori di casa, collected travel writing 1971: Satura (1962–1970) (January) 1971: La poesia non esiste, prose; Milan: Scheiwiller (February) 1973: Diario del ‘71 e del ‘72, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (a private edition of 100 copies was published in 1971) 1973: Trentadue variazioni, an edition of 250 copies, Milan: Giorgio Lucini 1977: Quaderno di quattro anni, Milan: Mondadori 1977: Tutte le poesie, Milan: Mondadori 1980: L’opera in versi, the Bettarini-Contini edition; published in 1981 as Altri verse e poesie disperse, publisher: Mondadori Translated in Montale’s lifetime 1966: Ossi di seppia, Le ocassioni, and La bufera e altro, translated by Patrice Angelini into French; Paris: Gallimard 1978: The Storm & Other Poems, translated by Charles Wright into English (Oberlin College Press), ISBN 0-932440-01-0 Posthumous 1981: Prime alla Scala, music criticism, edited by Gianfranca Lavezzi; Milan: Mondadori 1981: Lettere a Quasimodo, edited by Sebastiano Grasso; publisher: Bompiani 1983: Quaderno genovese, edited by Laura Barile; a journal from 1917, first published this year; Milan: Mondadori 1991: Tutte le poesie, edited by Giorgio Zampa. Jonathan Galassi calls this book the “most comprehensive edition of Montale’s poems”. 1996: Diario postumo: 66 poesie e altre, edited by Annalisa Cima; Milan: Mondadori 1996: Il secondo mestiere: Arte, musica, società and Il secondo mestierre: Prose 1929-1979, a two-volume edition including all of Montale’s published writings; edited by Giorgio Zampa; Milan: Mondadori 1999: Collected Poems, trans. Jonathan Galassi (Carcanet) (Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize) 2004: Selected Poems, trans. Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright, & David Young (Oberlin

College Press), ISBN 0-932440-98-3 Notes ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa Eugenio Montale, Collected Poems 1920-1954, translated and edited by Jonathan Galassi, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998, ISBN 0-374-12554-6 ^ Montale 1948, pp. 190-195. ^ Article of G. Raboni on Corriere della Sera (archiviostorico.corriere.it) Bibliography

Montale, Eugenio. “Eliot and Ourselves.” In T. S. Eliot: A Symposium, edited by Richard March and Tambimuttu, 190-195. London: Editions Poetry, 1948. Pietro Montorfani, «Il mio sogno di te non è finito»: ipotesi di speranza nell’universo montaliano, in «Sacra doctrina», (55) 2010, pp. 185–196. External links Eugenio Montale e la sua poesia (in Italian) Some poems in English Montale at the Nobel E-Museum Montale and T.S.Eliot (in Italian) View page ratings Rate this page Rate this page Page ratings What’s this? Current average ratings. Trustworthy Objective Complete Well-written I am highly knowledgeable about this topic (optional) I have a relevant college/university degree It is part of my profession It is a deep personal passion The source of my knowledge is not listed here I would like to help improve Wikipedia, send me an e-mail (optional)We will send you a confirmation e-mail. We will not share your e-mail address with outside parties as per our feedback privacy statement. Saved successfully Your ratings have not been submitted yet Your ratings have expired Please reevaluate this page and submit new ratings. An error has occurred. Please try again later. Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Please take a moment to complete a short survey. Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Do you want to create an account? An account will help you track your edits, get involved in discussions, and be a part of the community. or Thanks! Your ratings have been saved. Did you know that you can edit this page? Categories: 1896 births 1981 deaths Italian poets Nobel laureates in Literature Italian Nobel laureates People from Genoa Italian Life Senators Action Party (Italy) politicians en.wikipedia.org

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poesia di Eliot e Montale fra modernismo e metafisica ilpendolo.info

La poesia di Eliot e Montale fra modernismo e metafisica

di Loredana Carloni • set 13th, 2007 • Letteratura Thomas Stearn Eliot e Eugenio Montale, due eminenti voci del modernismo europeo, incarnano superbamente l’anima del loro tempo. Insigniti di premio Nobel, rispettivamente nel 1948 e 1975, attraverso la loro opera poetica rappresentano il dolore metafisico di un’epoca sofferente e vacua. Accomunati da una sensibilità estetica di radice simbolista e da un uso del linguaggio e dell’immagine che oggettiva l’emozione (correlativo oggettivo), i due autori interpretano con forza innovativa l’arte e l’esistenza attraverso il mistero della parola. La coesistenza di toni aulici e colloquiali, una ricerca metrica di rielaborazione dei modelli tradizionali e la scelta accurata di termini di grande potenza evocativa, rendono la loro opera di robusto impatto. Un’interpretazione metafisica della vita unitamente alla necessità di sacralità e salvezza emergono dalla produzione poetica dei due autori. Eliot però, a differenza di Montale, raggiunge l’anelata salvezza attraverso la scoperta della fede religiosa convertendosi all’anglicanesimo, esperienza che segna profondamente anche la sua creazione artistica. La poesia di Eliot, successivamente alla sua conversione religiosa (1927), passa da atmosfere di pessimismo cosmico a una visione ottimistica dell’esistere: fra i suoi componimenti più significativi in tal senso ricordiamo Prufrock e altre osservazioni (1917), La terra desolata (1922), Gli uomini vuoti (1925), Il viaggio dei Magi (1927), Mercoledì delle ceneri (1930), Quattro quartetti (1943). Montale invece, portavoce di una sacralità laica incarnata talvolta da emblematiche e salvifiche figure di donna, non ripone nella religione positiva alcuna certezza credendo esclusivamente nella ricerca interiore e nel valore della memoria: fra le sue raccolte più importanti citiamo Ossi di seppia (1925), Le occasioni (1939), La bufera e altro (1956), Xenia (1966). Riferimenti bibliografici T. S. Eliot, Opere, Bompiani, Milano 2001 E. Montale, Tutte le poesie, Mondadori, Milano 1991 Loredana Carloni -http:// | Tutti gli articoli di Loredana Carloni ilpendolo.info

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