Literary Birthday – 12 October – Eugenio Montale

Eugenio Montale was born 12 October 1896, and died 12 September 1981.

Seven Quotes

1. Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.
2. 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.
3. There is also poetry written to be shouted in a square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in countries where authoritarian regimes are in power.
4. No writer in our time has been more isolated than Kafka, and yet few have achieved communication as well as he did.
5. I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.
6. Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
7. The poet does not know – often he will never know – whom he really writes for.

Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and the recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature. Read a selection of his poetry in Cuttlefish Bones.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eugenio_Montale.jpg

Kaj Hagman., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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