Definition is the staple of critical discourse. Eugenio Montale in his poetry frustrates definition. His music is crepuscular as it enfolds and merges dissimilar things. He is an anti-romantic poet and contemptuous of "New Sirens" and weather-worn Tritons. He is also, when estimated with the eye of hindsight, the legatee and perpetuator of the romantic tradition, remembering—but the participle fails to do justice—"the wild fire that burned in the veins of the world." So two truths are told of him. An accurate reading of his quality will seek to run the two together….

Montale, like [the] Crepuscolari or twilight poets,… repudiates the fictive order of boxwood and acanthus as fabricated by "the poets laureate," a derisive appellation…. But he repudiates impartially the disorder of his own time,… a heap of broken images disposed as by Eliot in The Waste Land—devoid of form as the adjective...