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Is
poetry still possible?
The
Nobel Prize has been awarded this year for the seventy-fifth time, if
I am not misinformed. And if there are many scientists and writers who
have earned this prestigious recognition, the number of those who are
living and still working is much smaller. Some of them are present here
and I extend my greetings and best wishes to them. According to widespread
opinion, the work of soothsayers who are not always reliable, this year
or in the years which can be considered imminent, the entire world (or
at least that part of the world which can be said to be civilized) will
experience a historical turning of colossal proportions. It is obviously
not a question of an eschatological turning, of the end of man himself,
but of the advent of a new social harmony of which there are presentiments
only in the vast domains of Utopia. At the date of the event the Nobel
Prize will be one hundred years old and only then will it be possible
to make a complete balance sheet of what the Nobel Foundation and the
connected prize have contributed to the formation of a new system of
community life, be it that of universal well-being or malaise, but of
such an extent as to put an end, at least for many centuries, to the
centuries-long diatribe on the meaning of life. I refer to human life
and not to the appearance of the amino-acids which dates back several
thousand million years, substances which made possible the apparition
of man and perhaps already contained the project of him. In this case
how long the step of the deus absconditus is! But I do not intend
to stray from my subject and I wonder if the conviction on which the
statute of the Nobel Prize is based is justified: and that is that sciences,
not all on the same level, and literary works have contributed to the
spread and defence of new values in a broad "humanistic" sense. The
response is certainly affirmative. The register of the names of those
who, having given something to humanity, have received the coveted recognition
of the Nobel Prize would be long. But infinitely more numerous and practically
impossible to identify would be the legion, the army of those who work
for humanity in infinite ways even without realizing it and who never
aspire to any possible prize because they have not written works, acts
or academic treatises and have never thought of "making the presses
groan", as the Italian expression says. There certainly exists an army
of pure, immaculate souls, and they are an obstacle (certainly insufficient)
to the spread of that utilitarian spirit which in various degrees is
pushed to the point of corruption, crime and every form of violence
and intolerance. The academicians of Stockholm have often said no to
intolerance, cruel fanaticism and that persecuting spirit which turns
the strong against the weak, oppressors against the oppressed. This
is true particularly in their choice of literary works, works which
can sometimes be murderous, but never like that atomic bomb which is
the most mature fruit of the eternal tree of evil.
I will not insist on this point because I am neither a philosopher,
sociologist nor moralist.
I have written poems and for this I have been awarded a prize. But I
have also been a librarian, translator, literary and musical critic
and even unemployed because of recognized insufficiency of loyalty to
a regime which I could not love. A few days ago a foreign journalist
came to visit me and she asked me, "How did you distribute so many different
activities? So many hours for poetry, so many hours for translation,
so many for clerical activity and so many for life?" I tried to explain
to her that it is to plan a lifetime as one plans an industrial project.
In the world there is a large space for the useless, and indeed one
of the dangers of our time is that mechandizing of the useless to which
the very young are particularly sensitive.
At any rate I am here because I have written poems. A completely useless
product, but hardly ever harmful and this is one of its characteristics
of nobility. But it is not the only one, since poetry is a creation
or a sickness which is absolutely endemic and incurable.
I am here because I have written poems: six volumes, in addition to
innumerable translations and critical essays. They have said that it
is a small production, perhaps supposing that the poet is a producer
of merchandise; the machines must be utilized to the full extent. Fortunately,
poetry is not merchandise. It is a phenomenon of which we know very
little, so much so that two philosophers as different as Croce, a historicist
and idealist, and Gilson, a Catholic, are in agreement in considering
it impossible to write a history of poetry. For my part, if I consider
poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of
adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
Only much later could speech and music be written in some way and differentiated.
Written poetry appears, but the relationship in common with music makes
itself felt. Poetry tends to open in architectonic forms, there arise
the meters, the strophes, the so-called fixed forms. Already in the
Nibelungenlied and then in Romance epic cycles, the true material
of poetry is sound. But a poem which also addresses itself to the eye
will not be long in appearing with the Provencal poets. Slowly poetry
becomes visual because it paints images, but it is also musical: it
unites two arts into one. Naturally the formal structures made up a
large part of poetic visibility. After the invention of printing, poetry
becomes vertical, does not fill the white space completely, it is rich
in new paragraphs and repetitions. Even certain empty spaces have a
value. Prose, which occupies all the space and does not give indications
of its pronounceability, is very different. And at this point the metrical
structures can be an ideal instrument for the art of narration, that
is for the novel. This is the case for that narrative instrument which
is the eight-line stanza, a form which was already a fossile in the
early Nineteenth Century in spite of the success of Byron's Don Juan
(a poem which remained half-finished).
But towards the end of the Nineteenth Century, the fixed forms of poetry
no longer satisfied the eye or the ear. An analogous observation can
be made for English blank verse and for the corresponding verse form,
endecasillabo sciolto. And in the meantime painting was making
great strides towards the dissolution of naturalism, and the repercussion
was immediate in pictorial art. Thus with a long process, which would
require too much time to describe here, one arrived at the conclusion
that it was impossible to reproduce reality, real objects, thus creating
useless duplicates: but there are displayed in vitro or even
life-size the objects or figures of which Caravaggio or Rembrandt would
have presented a facsimile, a masterpiece. At the great exhibition in
Venice years ago the portrait of a mongoloid was displayed: the subject
was très déutant, but why not? Art can justify everything.
Expect that upon approaching it, one discovered that it was not a portrait
but the unfortunate himself, in flesh and blood. The experiment was
then interrupted manu militari, but in a strictly theoretical
context it was completely justified. For many years critics with university
chairs had preached the absolute necessity of the death of art, waiting
for who knows what palingenesis or resurrection, of which the signs
could not be glimpsed.
What conclusion can be drawn from such facts? Evidently the arts, all
the visual arts, are becoming more democratic in the worst sense of
the word. 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. The
example I cite could be extended to the exclusively noisy and undifferentiated
music listened to in those places where millions of young people gather
to exorcize the horror of their solitude. But why more than ever has
civilized man reached the point of having horror of himself?
Obviously I foresee the objections. We must not bring in the illnesses
of society, which have perhaps always existed, but were little known
because the former means of communication did not permit us to know
and diagnose the illness. It alarms me that a sort of general Doomsday
atmosphere accompanies an ever more wide-spread comfort, that well-being
(there where it exists, that is in limited areas of the world) has the
livid features of desperation. Against the dark background of this contemporary
civilization of well-being, even the arts tend to mingle, to lose their
identity. Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have
attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude
and reflection. Time becomes more rapid, works of a few years ago seem
"dated" and the need the artist has to be listened to sooner or later
becomes a spasmodic need of the topical, of the immediate. Whence the
new art of our time which is the spectacle, a not necessarily theatrical
exhibition in which the rudiments of every art are present and which
effects a kind of psychic massage on the spectator or listener or reader
as the case may be. The deus ex machina of this new heap is the
director. His purpose is not only to co-ordinate scenic arrangements,
but to give intentions to works which have none or have had other ones.
There is a great sterility in all this, an immense lack of confidence
in life. In such a landscape of hysterical exhibitionism what can be
place of poetry, the most discrete of arts, be? So-called lyrical poetry
is work, the fruit of solitude and accumulated impressions. This is
still true today but in rather limited cases. We have however more numerous
cases in which the self-proclaimed poet falls into step with new times.
Poetry then becomes acoustic and visual. The words splash in all directions,
like the explosion of a grenade, there is no true meaning, but a verbal
earthquake with many epicenters. Decipherment is not necessary, in many
cases the aid of the psychoanalyst may help. Since the visual aspect
prevails, the poem becomes translatable, and this is a new phenomenon
in the history of esthetics. This does not mean that the new poets are
schizoid. Some of them can write classically traditional verse and pseudo-verses
devoid of any sense. There is also poetry written to be shouted in a
square in front of an enthusiastic crowd. This occurs especially in
countries where authoritarian regimes are in power. And such athletes
of poetic vocalism are not always devoid of talent. I will cite such
a case and I beg your pardon if it is also a case which concerns me
personally. But the fact, if it is true, demonstrates that by now there
exist two types of poetry in cohabitation, one of which is for immediate
consumption and dies as soon as it is expressed, while the other can
sleep quietly. One day it will awaken, if it has the strength to do
so.
True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and
which only a few initiated people know. However, poetry does not live
solely in books or in school anthologies. The poet does not know and
often will never know his true receiver. I will give you a personal
example. In the archives of Italian newspapers there are the obituary
articles for men who are still alive and active. These articles are
called "crocodiles". A few years ago at the Corriere della Sera
I discovered my "crocodile", signed by Taulero Zulberti, critic, translator
and polyglot. He states that the great poet Majakovsky, having read
one or more of my poems translated into Russian, said: "Here is a poet
I like. I would like to be able to read him in Italian." The episode
is not improbable. My first verses began to circulate in 1925 and Majakovsky
(who travelled in the United States and elsewhere as well) committed
suicide in 1930.
Majakovsky was a poet with a pantograph, with a megaphone. If he said
such words I can say that my poems had found, by crooked and unforeseeable
paths, their receiver.
Do not believe, however, that I have a solipsistic idea of poetry. The
idea of writing for the so-called happy few was never mine. In reality
art is always for everyone and for no one. But what remains unforeseeable
is its true begetter, its receiver. Spectacle-art, mass art, art which
wants to produce a sort of physical-psychical message on a hypothetical
user, has infinite roads in front of it because the population of the
world is in continuous growth. But its limit is absolute void. It is
possible to frame and exhibit a pair of slippers (I myself have seen
mine in that condition), but a landscape, a lake or any great natural
spectacle cannot be displayed under glass.
Lyrical poetry has certainly broken its barriers. There is poetry even
in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or
didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or
less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection
with poetry. But this signifies little or nothing. The world is growing,
no one can say what its future will be. But it is not credible that
mass culture, with its ephemeral and brittle character, will not produce,
through necessary repercussions, a culture which is both defense and
reflection. We can all collaborate in this future. But man's life is
short and the life of the world can be almost infinitely long.
I had thought of giving this title to my short speech: "Will poetry
be able to survive in the universe of mass communication?" That is what
many people wonder, but upon thinking closely, the answer can only be
affirmative. If by poetry one means belletristic poetry it is clear
that the world production will continue to grow excessively. If instead
we limit ourselves to that poetry which refuses with horror the description
of production, that which arises almost through a miracle and seems
to embalm an entire epoch and a whole linguistic and cultural situation,
then it is necessary to say that there is no death possible for poetry.
It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language
on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip. Strangely,
Dante's Divine Comedy did not produce a prose of that creative
height or it did so after centuries. But if you study French prose before
and after the school of Ronsard, the Pléiade, you will observe
that French prose has lost that softness for which it was judged to
be so inferior to the classical languages and has taken a veritable
leap towards maturity. The effect has been curious. The Pléiade
does not produce collections of homogeneous poems like those of the
Italian dolce stil nuovo (which is certainly one of its sources),
but it gives us from time to time true "antique pieces" which could
be put in a possible imaginary museum of poetry. It is a question of
a taste which could be defined as Neo-Greek and which centuries later
the Parnasse will attempt in vain to equal. 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. Let us reread together
a poem by Joachim Du Bellay. This poet, born in 1522 and who died at
the age of thirty-three, was the nephew of a Cardinal with whom he lived
in Rome for several years, bringing back a profound disgust for the
corruption of the papal court. Du Bellay wrote a great deal, imitating
with greater or lesser success the poets of the Petrarchan tradition.
But the poem (perhaps written in Rome), inspired by Latin verses by
Navagero, which confirms his fame, is the fruit of a painful nostalgia
for the country-side of the sweet Loire which he had abandoned. From
Sainte-Beuve up to Walter Pater, who dedicated Joachim a memorable profile,
the sort Odelette read it if this is possible, because it is
a question of a poem in which the eye des vanneurs de blé
has entered the repertory of world poetry. Let us try to reread it if
this is possible, because it is a question of a poem in which the eye
has its role.
A vous troppe legere,
qui d'aele passagere
par le monde volez
et d'un sifflant murmure
l'ombrageuse verdure
doulcement esbranlez,
j'offre ces violettes,
ces lis et ces fleurettes,
et ces roses icy,
ces vermeillettes roses,
tout freschement écloses ,
et ces oeilletz aussi.
De vostre doulce halaine
eventez ceste plaine,
eventez ce sejour,
ce pendant que j'ahanne
a mon blé, que je vanne
a la chaleur du jour.
I do not if this Odelette was written in Rome as an interlude
in the dispatch of boring office matters. It owes its current survival
to Pater. At a distance of centuries a poem can find its interpreter.
But now in order to conclude, I should reply to the question which gave
a title to this brief speech. In the current consumistic civilization
which sees new nations and new languages appear in history, in the civilization
of robotman, what can the destiny of poetry be? There could be many
answers. Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of
everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready. Only at a
second moment do the problems of publishing and distribution arise.
The fire of the library of Alexandria destroyed three fourths of Greek
literature. 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. That the garden of the Muses can be devastated
by great tempests is, more than probable, certain. But it seems to me
just as certain that a great deal of printed paper and many books of
poetry must resist time.
The question is different if one refers to the spiritual revival of
an old poetic text, its contemporary restoration, its opening to new
interpretations. And finally it always remains doubtful within which
limits one moves when speaking of poetry. Much of today's poetry is
expressed in prose. Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose.
Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great
works of poetry. And the theater? Many literary histories do not even
discuss it, taking up instead several geniuses who are treated separately.
In addition how can one explain the fact that ancient Chinese poetry
survives all translations while European poetry is chained to its original
language? Perhaps the phenomenon can be explained by the fact that we
believe we are reading Po Chü-i and instead we are reading the
wonderful counterfeiter Arthur Waly? One could multiply the questions
with the sole result that not only poetry, but all the world of artistic
expression or that which proclaims itself to be such, has entered into
a crisis which is strictly tied to the human condition, to our existence
as human beings, to our certainty or illusion of believing ourselves
to be privileged beings, the only ones who believe they are the masters
of their destiny and the depositaries of a destiny which no other creature
can lay claim to. It is useless then to wonder what the destiny of the
arts will be. It is like asking oneself if the man of tomorrow, perhaps
of a very distant tomorrow, will be able to resolve the tragic contradictions
in which he has been floundering since the first day of Creation (and
if it is still possible to speak of such a day, which can be an endless
epoch).

(Eugenio Montale, "Nobel Lecture",
12 Dicembre 1975)
Copyright©1997 The Nobel Foundation
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