Journey as Stasis: A Reading of Montale's Early Poetics

Most scholars of twentieth-century Italian poetry agree that Eugenio Montale, beginning with his Ossi di seppia (hence forward Ods),¹ departs from the traditional Petrarchan line of Italian poetry, and shows instead a clear interest in Dante's less evocative and more precise, specific poetic language. In his first collection, Montale chooses, in fact, a concrete vocabulary, well suited to describe and depict the dry Ligurian landscape that forms such an essential part of the work. While his poetic investigation does not entirely reject the more elusive traditional lyric code—revived by Leopardi as well as by the French symbolists—it clearly shows the need for a more realistic tone and a linguistic variety that resembles the Dantean manner, as already noted from some of the first important essays on Montale.² While many critics may therefore agree that Montale had a real interest in Dante's poetic language, the depth and the purpose of his interest are not as easily discerned or agreed upon. We might, for example, bear in mind that, when identifying sources, the critical danger is either to over-evaluate the significance of the source for the understanding of the poetics of an author, or to assume an aesthetic connection which, at times, is either a matter of convenience or of historical memory.³ In the case of Dante, for instance, poets as different as Carducci or Marinetti both identified the author of the Divine Comedy as their poetic and ethical model in the span of just a few years.⁴ Furthermore, the recovery of a classical source is often filtered through other readings. Leopardi, for instance, represents the watershed for a certain type of evocative language that can be traced back to Petrarch. At the same time, Pascoli's and D'Annunzio's poems (especially, for the former, Myricae [1891–1900] and Canti di Castelvecchio [1903]; and for the latter Alcyone [1904]) present many stylistic traits that are normally attributed to the classical tradition, making it difficult to identify correctly the sources of numerous twentieth-century poets whose works have been affected by these two major figures.⁵ In other cases, reversing chronology as well as national boundaries may guide us to a proper understanding of the utilization of specific sources. Ungaretti's general predilection for a Petrarcan style, for instance, can be better interpreted if we consider that it was his early appreciation of Mallarmé that brought him to favor the more evocative trend of the Italian lyric tradition (see Ossola 239–305). Or, for another example, Manzoni scholars cannot determine whether or not his many Virgilian images come directly from the Latin poet—whose works Manzoni knew and appreciated immensely—or from posterior re-elaborations of Virgilian passages by Dante, Tasso, Parini or Monti.⁶

Linking a modern poet to a classical source can therefore often result in an easy but misleading critical exercise, unless we verify the depth of the relationship between the source and the modern poet. In the case of Montale and Dante, it is important to ascertain whether the former chooses to incorporate, in his own works, Dante's main poetic ideas, such as the theme of the journey as a new learning experience, the thirst for discovery as an antidote to resignation, the incessant hope for change, the drive to reach a different ethical world. In this regard, some scholars have indeed tied Montale's consideration of Dante to the former's own interest in poetic allegory; others have instead either denied such a connection with Dantean allegory, or have formulated it more simply, arguing that Montale's attention to Dante is mostly a stylistic one, with little or no ideological incorporation of Dante's aesthetic world.⁷

In this article, through the examination of a few key poems of Ods, I intend to revisit the issue of Montale's Dantism, believing that a closer reading of some of his early works will prove that, while the author of Ods certainly looked to Dante as one of his main models, he did not accept the major characteristic of Dante...