"Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection"
About this Quote
Montale’s line lands like a quiet alarm: modern media doesn’t merely fill time, it wages a campaign against the inner life. As a poet shaped by the 20th century’s noise - fascism, war, mass politics, mass markets - he treats “mass communication” less as a neutral tool than as an environment that rewires attention. The verb choice matters. “Attempted” suggests design, not accident; “not without success” admits the uncomfortable truth that the project largely worked. This isn’t nostalgia for pre-technology purity so much as a diagnosis of how the public sphere colonizes private consciousness.
“Annihilate” is the tell. It’s apocalyptic language aimed at something seemingly soft: solitude and reflection. Montale implies that these are not luxuries but conditions for moral and artistic agency. When radio and television occupy the room, they also occupy the mind, reducing the chances to sit with ambiguity, dread, desire - the raw material poetry metabolizes into meaning. In that sense, the quote doubles as self-defense: the poet explaining why poetry (slow, difficult, inward) must resist the era’s dominant tempo.
The context is mid-century Italy’s leap into broadcast culture, when television became the hearth and national unifier, standardizing taste, language, even aspiration. Montale hears that unification as flattening: a continuous stream that converts silence into dead air and reflection into inefficiency. The subtext is almost political: a citizenry trained to be perpetually addressed is easier to manage, easier to sell to, harder to surprise.
“Annihilate” is the tell. It’s apocalyptic language aimed at something seemingly soft: solitude and reflection. Montale implies that these are not luxuries but conditions for moral and artistic agency. When radio and television occupy the room, they also occupy the mind, reducing the chances to sit with ambiguity, dread, desire - the raw material poetry metabolizes into meaning. In that sense, the quote doubles as self-defense: the poet explaining why poetry (slow, difficult, inward) must resist the era’s dominant tempo.
The context is mid-century Italy’s leap into broadcast culture, when television became the hearth and national unifier, standardizing taste, language, even aspiration. Montale hears that unification as flattening: a continuous stream that converts silence into dead air and reflection into inefficiency. The subtext is almost political: a citizenry trained to be perpetually addressed is easier to manage, easier to sell to, harder to surprise.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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