Poetic Diaries 1971 and 1972

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.

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. In addition to his poetry, he was also the author of many works of nonfiction and a translator of authors including Shakespeare, Herman Melville, and T. S. Eliot. William Arrowsmith (1924-1992) was a renowned classicist, translator, and critic who also translated works by Euripides, Aristophanes, and Cesare Pavese. Rosanna Warren is the author of five books of poetry as well as works of criticism and translation. She teaches at Boston University and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.