Montale e la parola riflessa By Christine Ott (2006)

Montale e la parola riflessa is the title of Christine Ott’s recent study on Eugenio Montale’s entire poetic production which analyzes his poetry as the artistic result of a fusion between lyric and self-commenting poetic language, where the word riflessa assumes particular poetic, but also metapoetic significance. In her volume Ott re proposes a post-structuralist perspective on the whole of Montale’s poetic-linguistic excursus thus emphasising the need for a return to a metalinguistic analysis as a unifying key to the understanding not only of his poetry, but also of the enigmatic self lying behind the poetic language. Even more cogently, Ott points out the necessity of understanding the complex relationship between the Montalean poetic self and the language available to him for the expression of the complexities of the modern self.