Quotes by Eugenio Montale

• The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.
• 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.
• 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.
• There is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
• This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
• 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.
• Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.
• True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know.
• I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.
• Too many lives are needed to make just one.
• However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
• 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.
• In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.
• 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.
• Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.
• 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 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?
• It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.
• 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.