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Eugenio Montale Quotes


Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.

Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness.

But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.

Evidently the arts, all the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of the word.

For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.

Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who loves you.

However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.

I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.

I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.

I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.

Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.

Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready.

Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.

Strangely, Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative height or it did so after centuries.