44 Quotes by Eugenio Montale

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

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

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

Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.

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.

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

True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.

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

The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.