But poets were not considered dangerous and they were advised to exercise self-censorship. At most, poets were requested not to write at all. I took advantage of this negative liberty.
Eugenio MontaleRead
For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Poetry emerges as a blend of music and speech, rooted in primal human expression.
Eugenio Montale suggests that poetry is an essential form of artistic expression, deeply connected to music and the rhythmic patterns that echo our earliest forms of communication. He emphasizes that the evolution of poetry is an extension of music, highlighting how vocal sounds have been interwoven into human cultural expressions from ancient times.
Themes
PoetryMusicExpressionArtCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
During a poetry reading, one might introduce this quote to discuss the relationship between music and poetry.
More from Eugenio Montale
All quotes βThere is poetry even in prose, in all the great prose which is not merely utilitarian or didactic: there exist poets who write in prose or at least in more or less apparent prose; millions of poets write verses which have no connection with poetry.
Eugenio MontaleRead
Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.
Eugenio MontaleRead
It has often been observed that the repercussion of poetic language on prose language can be considered a decisive cut of a whip.
Eugenio MontaleRead
I have always knocked at the door of that wonderful and terrible enigma which is life.
Eugenio MontaleRead
Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought.
Eugenio MontaleRead
Similar quotes
It is the unspoken ethic of all magicians to not reveal the secrets.
David CopperfieldRead
Color is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state.
Yves KleinRead
I won't get into it any more than to say that there are parts of me in all the songs that I write.
Tracy ChapmanRead
To be creative means to connect. It's to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.
Nawal El SaadawiRead
An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity.
Eric CantonaRead
Beauty when unadorned is adorned the most.
St. JeromeRead