Life & Mortality Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale’s line carries the weary confidence of someone who watched Europe’s old certainties collapse and refused to pretend art was safely insulated from history. “Great lyric poetry” isn’t framed as a museum piece; it’s mortal. It can “die” and “die again,” a phrase that rejects the comforting myth of linear progress in culture. Lyric poetry, for Montale, is a living form that gets exhausted, discredited, or drowned out when the language itself becomes suspect: in the wake of mass politics, propaganda, war, and the industrial churn of modern life.

The intent is both defensive and unsentimental. He concedes the genre’s fragility - lyric depends on intimacy, attention, a belief that the interior life matters. Those conditions can vanish. Yet he also insists on poetry’s odd persistence: rebirth arrives not as a triumphant revival but as a recurrence, a return of necessity. When ordinary speech fails to hold experience, lyric resurfaces as a tool for precision, for saying what cannot be said any other way.

The subtext is Montale staking out a value claim without nostalgia. He’s not arguing that poetry will dominate culture; he’s arguing it will remain “outstanding” even when it’s peripheral. “Creation of the human soul” is deliberately high-register language, almost archaic, and that’s the point: in an era obsessed with systems, markets, and collective narratives, Montale smuggles the soul back in as a category. The line reads like a verdict delivered after repeated disappointments: poetry is breakable, revivable, and stubbornly human.