Life & Wisdom Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale draws a bright line between poetry as private lyric and poetry as public instrument, and he does it with a cool, almost surgical irony. “Shouted in a square” isn’t a romantic image of civic art; it’s a sound cue for mass politics. The square is where individuality dissolves into chant, where language stops being exploratory and becomes executable. Poetry, in this framing, can be engineered for volume rather than ambiguity.

The sting is in “also.” He’s not denying poetry’s possibilities; he’s cataloging one more use for it, like a tool that can cut or bludgeon. Under authoritarian regimes, art is pressured to become legible, repeatable, and emotionally synchronizing. The point is not to create meaning but to create compliance - to make the crowd feel itself as one body, “enthusiastic” in the way propaganda loves: energized, simplified, certain.

Montale wrote with the long shadow of Italian Fascism behind him, and his own poetics were famously resistant to slogans. His work leans toward fracture, doubt, and the hard-earned music of disillusionment. That context matters: he’s diagnosing a political demand placed on artists - turn your craft into a megaphone - and naming how quickly aesthetic forms get conscripted when power fears complexity.

The subtext is a warning delivered in plain clothes. When poetry is optimized for the square, it may still rhyme, still thrill, still move the throat. It just moves it in one direction.