top of page
"I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"For awhile after you quit Keats all other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming."

"I don't think Auden liked my poetry very much, he's very Anglican."

"How these words, wait to diein the arms of all the poetry..yet to be written."

"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."

"Each drop that fell, had a story to tell.each smile that curved, said a million words.(Poem: Our Existence, Book: Ginger and Honey)"

"A chronic poet should always be an inveterate nature-lover."

"Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance."
Explore more quotes by Eugenio Montale

"True poetry is similar to certain pictures whose owner is unknown and which only a few initiated people know."

"Man cannot produce a single work without the assistance of the slow, assiduous, corrosive worm of thought."

"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."

"This proves that great lyric poetry can die, be reborn, die again, but will always remain one of the most outstanding creations of the human soul."

"Poetry is the art which is technically within the grasp of everyone: a piece of paper and a pencil and one is ready."

"Today not even a universal fire could make the torrential poetic production of our time disappear. But it is exactly a question of production, that is, of hand-made products which are subject to the laws of taste and fashion."

"I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?"
bottom of page