Art & Creativity Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale frames poetry as a kind of quiet double agent: it sneaks into the eye while it works on the ear. “Slowly” matters here. He isn’t describing a stunt where verse instantly turns into illustration or song; he’s describing an accumulation effect, the way a line, repeated cadence, or an image returned to in a new key begins to feel spatial and audible at once. Poetry becomes “visual” not because it competes with painting, but because it performs painting’s essential trick: making absence feel present. The page stays flat; the reader’s mind doesn’t.

Then he pivots: “but it is also musical.” Montale’s poetry is famous for restraint, for refusing the lush obviousness of lyricism while still insisting on sound as meaning. In his world, music isn’t decoration; it’s structure and pressure. Rhythm, recurrence, and vowel-color carry emotional information that the literal statement can’t safely confess. That’s the subtext: poetry is a merger of arts because it needs more than paraphrase to tell the truth.

Context sharpens the claim. Writing through Italy’s early-to-mid 20th century crises, Montale belonged to a modernism suspicious of grand rhetoric, yet hungry for new forms of intensity. His “two arts into one” is less a romantic fusion fantasy than a defense of poetry’s stubborn relevance: when politics and propaganda flatten language, the poem preserves complexity by operating on multiple sensory channels at once. It doesn’t just describe experience; it re-simulates it, forcing readers to hear what they see and see what they hear.