Eugenio Montale

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896, the youngest child of a merchant family, and spent his summers at Monterosso on the Ligurian coast, whose sun-bleached rocks and sea would furnish the landscape of his first poems. Frail as a child, he was largely self-taught in literature, and for some years trained seriously as an opera singer under the baritone Ernesto Sivori. He served as an infantry officer in the First World War before turning to poetry; his first collection, Cuttlefish Bones (1925), at once set him apart from the rhetoric of Gabriele D’Annunzio and the Futurists.

In 1927 he moved to Florence, and two years later became director of the Gabinetto Vieusseux library, a post he lost in 1938 under the fascist regime, whose party he had not joined. The Occasions (1939) is more inward and hermetic than its predecessor, many of its poems addressed to Clizia, a figure drawn from the American Dante scholar Irma Brandeis. The war and its aftermath darken The Storm and Other Things (1956). Across these books Montale built a poetry of objects and fleeting epiphanies — a lemon tree, an eel, a broken link in a chain — in which the possibility of meaning is glimpsed rather than affirmed.

From 1948 he lived in Milan, writing on literature and music for the Corriere della Sera. His late work changed register: Satura (1971), which includes the Xenia sequence for his wife Drusilla Tanzi, is conversational, ironic and tender. He was made a senator for life in 1967, received the Nobel Prize in 1975, and died in Milan in 1981, by then regarded as the leading Italian poet of his century.