An Equivocal Echo: Eugenio Montale

Building on early encounters with a possible Neoplatonic echo in his poetics, this chapter explores how Montale adapted the ‘donna amata’ in Dante to an aesthetic wrestling with his times — the years from his first meeting with the Dante scholar Irma Brandeis in 1933 to the publications of Le occasioni (1939) and La bufera (1957). With the end of their involvement in 1939, Montale cast the relationship with Brandeis as an echo of the spiritual philosophy of his great forebear. From their meeting until plans to be united were abandoned with the introduction of the 1938 Racial Laws — Brandeis being American Jewish — and the coming of war in 1940, Montale’s poetry constitutes a spiritualised resistance to the Fascist Italy in which the poet lived as an inner émigré, a resistance in which being driven inwards by events also drove on the spiritual ascent.