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“... 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 ...”

“... a singer out of breath or a poet without inspiration is said to have broken mirrors. In ‘Reading Montale’, an essay appended to his translation of the poet’s first three books, Jonathan Galassi considers the old and especially Mediterranean association of poet and cicada and its recurrence in Montale’s poems. Feeble ...”

“... Poetry, Eugenio Montale said in his Nobel Prize address, is not merchandise. On that basis he excused himself for having turned out comparatively few poems. Put together, however, they make a volume of impressive dimensions, especially if you count in the fourth dimension, time. Annotated with unimpeachable scholarly patience and critical judgment by Gianfranco Contini and his pupil Rosanna Bettarini, L’opera in versi is the book with a capital ‘b’, or libro with a capital ‘l’, which this great poet, as personally modest as he was vocationally proud, always looked forward to in trepidation and worked towards with confidence ...”

“... The first Montale poem to make any impression on me was ‘Eastbourne’ in the harsh translation by G.S. Fraser in the New Directions Selected Poems: ‘God Save the King’ the trumpets moan and groan From a pavilion high on piles That gape to let the sea through when it comes To wash out wet Horse-hoofmarks on the sand Of this sea-shore ...”

“... Wright looks to the future to clarify – and perhaps redeem – the past. He has written of Eugenio Montale (whose collection The Storm he translated into English) that his ‘imagery gives hints of a succession of little apocalypses’. This might suggest that the Apocalypse is never now, or that you’ll need more than one.As a teenager Wright ...”

“... quarter of Palermo. In 1954, Lampedusa’s cousin, Lucio Piccolo, was invited to San Pellegrino by Eugenio Montale, the poet and Italy’s most influential critic, and received a prize for his volume of poems, Canti Barocchi. For years, Lampedusa had spent several days a month with Lucio and his equally singular brothers in their arcadian house at Capo ...”

“... than his disinclination to take up European works – in this book there are two short pieces on Eugenio Montale that are sensitive and even, within bounds, comparative. The determining limitation shows up whenever Leavis suspects the presence of a ‘religion of equality’ enforced by an emphasis on ‘economic considerations’ or some other mode of ...”