Eugenio Montale

This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian poet Eugenio Montale’s poetics of mourning. His principal collections are read through a critical framework using scholarship on mourning, lyric theory and feminist approaches. «Deeply versed in recent theoretical discussions of the lyric form in general and the elegy in particular, Adele Bardazzi also brings to bear queer thinking on temporality and philosophical treatments of mourning to shift the understanding of Montale’s verse, contesting the division between an early lyrical phase and a later ironic phase. A rich combination of sensitive readings and critical reflection.» (Jonathan Culler, Cornell University, Author of Theory of the Lyric) «In a series of carefully wrought readings of poems in which Montale writes of his lost loves, death, mourning, and his own quite particular vision of the afterlife, Adele Bardazzi both challenges traditional interpretations of Montalian poetic beloveds and offers her own convincing overview of the eschatological dimension of one of the twentieth century’s most essential bodies of verse. A surprisingly fresh take on a much-studied poet, this fine book gives new life to the realm of death in which Montale’s poetry of mourning is so tenaciously rooted.» (Rebecca West, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Emerita of Italian, University of Chicago) «Adele Bardazzi’s book offers an original perspective on Montale’s work. The poetics of mourning allows on the one hand to read the text in the light of the theory of the lyric and, on the other hand, to highlight the importance of some figures in Montale’s poetry, through an evocative comparison with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and that of Persephone.» (Niccolò Scaffai, Associate Professor of Literary…