Eugenio Montale is an ideal recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature: a writer preeminent in his own country whose values are simple and universal.

What Montale has stood for throughout his long life is above all intelligence and what he calls ‘decenza quotidiana.’ He may be classified as a lyric poet––and as the finest of Italian lyric poets since Leopardi––but he is also a poet for whom intelligence matters more than sentiment, and common decency more than any high-flown political or metaphysical allegiance. Montale is in this respect a contradiction: a wonderfully varied and resourceful poet who holds essentially prosaic values.