Time & Perspective Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale snaps at his own century with a poet's version of media criticism: the problem isn't that there is too much poetry; it's that there is too much output. The opening image is deliciously apocalyptic - a "universal fire" that still couldn't burn through the glut - and it lands like a grim joke. If even catastrophe can't clear the shelves, then the shelves are the point.

The pivot matters: "not even" sets up a complaint about permanence, then Montale undercuts it by calling poetry "production". That one word drags lyric ambition into the world of workshops, commodities, and trend cycles. He's not condemning craft (hand-made products can be exquisite) so much as demoting the aura of poetry from revelation to manufacture. Once poems are understood as artisanal objects, they become "subject to the laws of taste and fashion" - the same forces that decide hemlines, decor, and which aesthetic gets rewarded this season.

Context sharpens the sting. Montale writes out of early-to-mid 20th century Europe, where mass culture and mass politics both taught artists how easily language can be standardized, circulated, instrumentalized. He was an anti-rhetorical modernist: wary of grand gestures, allergic to easy transcendence. The subtext is a defense mechanism. In a marketplace of endless "poetic production", the poet's task becomes less to add volume than to resist becoming a product line - to make work that can't be reduced to a style tag, can't be consumed as mere fashion, and can't be mistaken for cultural noise even when the world is loud enough to require fire.