"Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry"
About this Quote
Montale slips a knife into a tired genre hierarchy and twists it just enough to draw blood. By calling the novel - the supposedly baggy, bourgeois form of plot and furniture - a producer of "great works of poetry", he’s not flattering fiction so much as redefining poetry’s jurisdiction. The provocation is quiet: poetry is not a container (line breaks, meter, lyric “I”), it’s an intensity, a way language concentrates experience until it changes pressure and becomes something else.
The range "from Murasaki to Proust" is doing strategic work. It’s global and historical without sounding like a syllabus: The Tale of Genji and In Search of Lost Time are monuments of interiority, time, and perception, not just story engines. Montale’s subtext is that the highest narrative art dissolves the boundary between describing a life and making music out of it. When fiction gets obsessed with sensation, memory, rhythm, the sentence starts behaving like a line of verse - and the reader starts reading for cadence, for metaphor, for reverberation, not merely for what happens next.
Context matters because Montale is a poet staking out a defense of poetry in the 20th century, an era when the novel looked like the dominant cultural machine. Instead of sulking, he annexes its triumphs. It’s also a corrective to critics who treat the novel as “realistic” and poetry as “pure.” Montale suggests the opposite: the novel’s greatest realism is achieved through poetic means, and poetry’s survival may depend on admitting that its most powerful migrations happen inside prose.
The range "from Murasaki to Proust" is doing strategic work. It’s global and historical without sounding like a syllabus: The Tale of Genji and In Search of Lost Time are monuments of interiority, time, and perception, not just story engines. Montale’s subtext is that the highest narrative art dissolves the boundary between describing a life and making music out of it. When fiction gets obsessed with sensation, memory, rhythm, the sentence starts behaving like a line of verse - and the reader starts reading for cadence, for metaphor, for reverberation, not merely for what happens next.
Context matters because Montale is a poet staking out a defense of poetry in the 20th century, an era when the novel looked like the dominant cultural machine. Instead of sulking, he annexes its triumphs. It’s also a corrective to critics who treat the novel as “realistic” and poetry as “pure.” Montale suggests the opposite: the novel’s greatest realism is achieved through poetic means, and poetry’s survival may depend on admitting that its most powerful migrations happen inside prose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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