Innovative stylistic resources in Eugenio Montale's recent poetry
Date
2015-09-10
Authors
Sansalvadore, Giovanna
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
This thesis sets out firstly to review the recent
Italian and non-Italian bibliography on the problems
in Montale's last three volumes. The opening chapter
shows how the Nobel prize winning poet's manner
altered sharply after La bufera e altro with the
collection Satura (1971). It reviews the major responses
to Satura, before passing on to a rasseqna
of responses to the two M a r i , Quaderno and Altri
versi. Having covered the new critical tradition
it analyzes Montale's typographical presentation of
long, short, titled, untitled, free, rhyming, epigrammatic,
punning, polemical, lyric, semi-serious,
tendentiously polemical or whimsically anti-literary
poems.
The second chapter considers the texts' studied 'occasionalness1
and apparent 'anti-poeticity', as well as
component parts which break this pattern. The study
admits that Montale's recent production does not stand
the test of high lyric perfection which most commentators
detect in Ossi, Occasion! and Bufera.
Chapter 111 considers the M a r i , Quaderno and Altri
versi as (a) Montale's assiduous annotation of a
modus vivendi in our own time, (b) a dissolution and
relativization of all interpretations of time, (c) the
'permanent oxymoron' of the recent years, present in
Satura but now flowering in the lack of affirmation
and negation, in short, the constant and oscillating
and uncertain affirmation of contraries, (d) lists,
elenchus, (e) the linguistic privileging of totem fauna
and talismanic objects, (e) enumeration as well as
elenchus, of sub-species of items scarcely relevant to
the poet's immortality and so forth. As an example
of our line of enquiry we recall the slapping water
in v.7 of 'Casa sul mare' (1927), 'Un altro, altra acqua,
a tratti...', where semantic effect is subordinated
to the genderless trap set by water in eternal motion;
mindful always of Montale's own warning that his reader
can be 'depistato' by his work and its effects, we refuse
to be 'misdirected', in this thesis, by the poet's
biography or prose criticism.
There are four Appendices which give a selection of colloquial
harms used in the three collections, as well as
a complete listing of animals., parentheses and foreign
words.
We have attempted to show that poetry, that supremely
useless human occupation, is part of art after all.
Description
A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts,
University of the Witwatersrandj Johannesburg
for the Degree of Master of Arts
Johannesburg 1982