Life & Wisdom Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale imagines poetry not as a decorative art but as a technological upgrade: speech bolted onto rhythm. That phrasing - “born of the necessity” - strips poetry of romance and replaces it with pressure. Something in the human animal needed an extra layer of meaning beyond the “hammering” pulse of early tribal music, so language got grafted onto beat like a tool invented mid-ritual.

The line’s power comes from its modest heresy. Poetry, in this view, doesn’t descend from the muses; it climbs out of percussion. “Hammering” is pointedly unpretty: it evokes labor, repetition, the bodily insistence of drums and feet. Montale implies that music came first because it’s communal and pre-verbal, a way to synchronize a group before it can narrate itself. Then speech arrives as an intrusion and an innovation, turning shared trance into articulated thought - and, crucially, into argument, memory, and identity.

There’s subtext here about modernity and fracture. Montale, writing out of early 20th-century upheaval and Italy’s cultural disillusionments, often treated language as both necessary and compromised. By rooting poetry in a hybrid origin, he’s also hinting at poetry’s permanent tension: it’s never pure song, never pure statement. It’s the uneasy marriage of body and mind, chant and sentence. That’s why it survives. It answers a need: to make the brute force of rhythm carry the burdens of consciousness.