1975 Nobel Prize in Literature
Eugenio Montale
"for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions"
Date
  • 23 October 1975 (1975-10-23) (announcement)
  • 10 December 1975
    (ceremony)
LocationStockholm, Sweden
Presented bySwedish Academy
First awarded1901
WebsiteOfficial website

The 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions".[1] He is the fifth Italian laureate for the literature prize.

Laureate

Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, Eugenio Montale is associated with the poetic school of hermeticsm, the Italian variant of the French symbolism movement, although Montale himself did not consider himself to be part of the hermetic school. His poetry is often compared to T. S. Eliot. When the Swedish Academy awarded him with the Nobel Prize in 1975, they called him “one of the most important poets of the contemporary West”.[2]

Award ceremony

At the award ceremony on 10 December 1975, Anders Österling of the Swedish Academy said:

"at his best Montale, with strict discipline, has attained a refined artistry, at once personal and objective, in which every word fills its place as precisely as the glass cube in a coloured mosaic. The linguistic laconicism cannot be carried any further; every trace of embellishment and jingle has been cleared away. When, for instance, in the remarkable portrait-poem of the Jewes Dora Markus, he wants to indicate the current background of time, he does so in five words: Distilla veleno una fede feroce (“A fierce faith distils poison”). In such masterpieces both the fateful perspective and the ingeniously concentrated structure are reminiscent of T.S. Eliot and “The Waste Land”, but Montale is unlikely to have received impulses from this quarter and his development has, if anything, followed a parallel path"[3]

References

  1. ↑ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1975". nobelprize.org.
  2. ↑ "Eugenio Montale". poetryfoundation.org. 10 April 2023.
  3. ↑ "Award ceremony speech". nobelprize.org.
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