Collection: Eugenio Montale

Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) was born in Genoa. In his teens, he studied accounting at vocational school and pursued his passion for poetry at the library. After serving in the infantry in the Great War and training to be an opera singer, he published his debut collection, Cuttlefish Bones, in 1925—the first of many books of poetry that would establish him as the leading Italian writer of his generation. A sworn anti-Fascist, he spent most of the Mussolini era barely making ends meet in Florence, where he got to know, among others, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Tommaso Landolfi, and Irma Brandeis (the subject of some of his most ardent love poems). In 1948, Montale moved from Florence to Milan, becoming a regular contributor to the newspaper Corriere della Sera, where many of the prose pieces in Butterfly of Dinard were first published. After taking a hiatus from poetry for much of the 1960s, he returned to it in the 1970s with a series of books remarkable for their unstudied epigrammatic elegance. A selection of this work, titled Late Montale, is published by NYRB Poets. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975.