Montale e la poesia ermetica

Eugenio Montale won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975, but his poetic voice has always remained resistant, difficult, reticent.

He is the poet of absence, of the negative, of what cannot be said.

His first book, Ossi di seppia, from 1925, immediately makes his poetic programme clear.

Poetry does not console, does not celebrate, does not reassure: it bears witness to the evil of living.

Here is the expression he himself uses: the evil of living — not Romantic pain, but something more muffled and cosmic.

Montale belongs to that current we call hermeticism, even though he himself shied away from labels.

The hermetic movement is a poetry of silence and allusion: it speaks in oblique images, not through direct assertions.

In this, the historical context matters enormously: we are in the years of Fascism, where public language is corrupted by rhetoric.

Montale responds with silence and the fragment: using language in a way that resists every instrumental use.

His poems are dense with concrete objects: the lemon, the crumbling wall, the Ligurian sea.

But these objects are never mere decorations: they carry the weight of a meaning that eludes any rational explanation.

This is the essence of hermeticism: the reader is not guided towards a meaning, but must find it for themselves.

Montale's second great book, Le Occasioni of 1939, takes this density to the extreme.

At the centre of that book is the figure of Clizia, inspired by the American scholar Irma Brandeis.

Clizia is the absent one par excellence: a presence that illuminates precisely because she is not there.

And yet Montale never falls into sentimentalism: his emotion is always filtered through irony and formal rigour.

This is perhaps what makes him still so necessary: in an age of hyperbole and noise, he teaches us to be silent in the right way.