Art & Creativity Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale needles one of literature’s oldest vanities: the belief that poetry is a costume you can put on by breaking lines. He flips the hierarchy. Prose, supposedly the workhorse mode, can carry “poetry” when it refuses to be merely useful or instructive; verse, supposedly the elevated mode, can be dead on arrival when it’s only rhythm and decoration. The jab is surgical because it targets form as a social alibi. Calling something a poem has long functioned like a cultural passport - instant seriousness, instant sensitivity - while “prose” gets treated as the realm of information, argument, chores. Montale’s point is that the real dividing line isn’t typography; it’s attention.

The subtext is also a defense of modernist integrity. Writing in early-to-mid 20th-century Europe, Montale is surrounded by competing pressures: political rhetoric demanding didactic clarity, avant-garde experimentation flirting with emptiness, and a public trained to equate “poetic” with lyrical prettiness. His criteria cuts through all of it. “Great prose” becomes a model of density, music, and surprise - language that does more than deliver a message. Meanwhile, “millions” of verse-writers get dismissed as technicians of sentiment, producing lines that look like poetry while evading its risk: precision, compression, and genuine perception.

It works because it’s both generous and contemptuous. Montale opens the door to poetic possibility in unexpected places, then slams it on the factory-line poem. The sting is the challenge: stop asking what genre you’re in; ask whether your language is awake.