Poetic Diaries 1971 and 1972 Paperback by Eugenio Montale

Product Details

• Publisher: WW Norton (2012-12-04)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 192 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780393344196
• Item Weight: 285.77 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

Poetic Diaries 1971 and 1972 is one of the Nobel Prize–winning poet Eugenio Montale’s final works, and it reveals the last act of the twentieth-century master to be one of splendid negation.

Poetic Diaries 1971 and 1972 is ruled by a brusque economy, and Montale’s is, here, a poetics of magnificent reduction. The poet meditates on the very conditions of his art: language reveals itself to be madness, and poetry a broken promise. The Muse has become a scarecrow: “She still has / one sleeve, with which she conducts her scrannel / straw quartet. It’s the only music I can stand.” And yet music it is, and time and time again Montale attains a contrarian grandeur that renews faith in the art he punishes. These poems are dense and dramatic, evasive and erotic and vividly alive.

About the Author

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.

William Arrowsmith was a renowned translator and classics scholar.

Rosanna Warren is the author of Hindsight and six previous volumes of poetry and is a professor emerita in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. She is a recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among others. She lives in New York City.