Life & Wisdom Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale’s swipe lands because it’s not nostalgic hand-wringing about “kids these days” so much as a surgical distinction between form and force. Calling contemporary “verses” mere prose is an accusation of slackness: lines that look like poetry on the page but don’t earn their line breaks. The sting is in the second clause. Prose can be great; Montale’s point is that much of what passes for poetry has abandoned poetry’s disciplines without gaining prose’s virtues. If you’re going to renounce meter, music, and compression, you’d better at least deliver clarity, argument, narrative velocity, or psychological precision. Instead, he suggests, we get the worst of both worlds: chopped-up paragraphs, private reveries, and an inflated sense of depth achieved by spacing.

The subtext is aesthetic but also moral. Montale came of age amid modernism’s rupture and the political pressure-cooker of early- to mid-century Italy. His own work is famously exacting, suspicious of grand rhetoric, and allergic to easy consolation. From that vantage, “bad prose” isn’t only a technical failure; it’s a cultural one, a symptom of language going soft at the exact moment history demands hardness. There’s also a quiet jab at literary fashion: free verse as a shortcut, not a choice. Montale’s authority comes from restraint. He isn’t defending old forms; he’s defending standards. Poetry, for him, is what remains after you remove everything you can’t justify.