‘The movie theatres are little bits of things’: Poetry and Cinema in Montale and Stevens

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Abstract Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, José Ortega y Gasset: these are just a few of the thinkers who, at the turn of the twentieth century, expressed critical views on cinema and the way it affects its audience. Poets of the same period were equally sceptical about the new media and, above all, about the model of mass liberal education that was held responsible for their success. Caught between fascination and revulsion, they nevertheless seemed unable to avoid adding to their texts some elements taken from the collective and supposedly hypnotizing experience of watching a movie, often with the aim of contrasting it with the solitary and controlled experience of reading a poem. This article aims to reflect on these intermediary fragments in the work of two of the most representative authors of European and Anglo-American Modernism: Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens. The analysis of ‘Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro’ and ‘The Ordinary Women’, as well as the reading of their notes on cinema, will allow us to show that the relationship of Modernist poetry (a supposedly conservative and elitist movement) with mass culture and its media is much more ambivalent than is usually thought.