Montale as postmodernist

Abstract

The article considers primarily Montale’s fourth book, Satura (1971), and interrogates the connections between the new direction of Montale’s poetry and the scientific and philosophical trends of the 1950s and 1960s. To describe Montale’s late work as postmodernist is to measure the self-conscious distancing of his poetics from the writing of the first three volumes: the poetic voice of Satura explores the dialectic relationship between modern and postmodern. The common postmodernist annulments – the end of ideology, the end of history, the end of authorial presence, the distinction between high and low culture – all play a role in Satura’s composition. The article includes a discussion of Cesare Vasoli’s Tra cultura e ideologia as an important source to explain Montale’s suspension of poetic output as a symptom of the political and philosophical disillusionment he experienced during the years of the reconstruction and the economic boom. Using the latter text as a guide, the article analyzes one of the most hermeneutically complex poems of Satura, ‘Dialogo’.