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I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me.

Eugenio Montale

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Eugenio Montale
Age: 85 †
Born: 1896
Born: January 12
Died: 1981
Died: September 12
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Poetry

More quotes by Eugenio Montale

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Holidays - Have no pity.
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Against the dark background of this contemporary civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their identity.
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I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.
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It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.
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I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?
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Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion.
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The real history, the one that counts and is not to be found in books, is precisely this one, the one made by simple men and it is the only one that rules the world.
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But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
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Slowly poetry becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it unites two arts into one.
Eugenio Montale
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Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.
Eugenio Montale
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However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies.
Eugenio Montale
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The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think.
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This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul.
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The most dangerous aspect of present-day life is the dissolution of the feeling of individual responsibility. Mass solitude has done away with any difference between the internal and the external, between the intellectual and the physical.
Eugenio Montale
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Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Eugenio Montale
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Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness.
Eugenio Montale