How Montale earned his living

Clive James

  • The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale translated by Jonathan Galassi
    Ecco Press (New York), 354 pp, $17.50, October 1982, ISBN 0 912946 84 9
  • Prime alla Scala by Eugenio Montale
    Mondadori (Milan), 522 pp, October 1981, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
  • Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: A Dream in Reason’s Presence by Glauco Cambon
    Princeton, 274 pp, £16.80, January 1983, ISBN 0 691 06520 9

If Eugenio Montale had never written a line of verse he would still have deserved his high honours merely on the basis of his critical prose. The product of a long life spent clearing the way for his poetry, it is critical prose of the best type: highly intelligent without making mysteries, wide-ranging without lapses into eclecticism or displays of pointless erudition, hard-bitten yet receptive, colloquial yet compressed. The only drawback is that it constitutes a difficult body of work to epitomise without falsifying.

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