SOURCE: "Eugenio Montale's Poetry: A Meeting of Dante and Brueghel," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXVI, No. 1, 1958, pp. 1-32.

An Italian-born educator and critic, Cambon has written extensively on Montale and edited his Selected Poems (1966). Joseph Brodsky called him Montale's "most perceptive critic." In the following essay, Cambon comments on the style and worldview of Montale's early poetry.

If there ever was a writer who found himself entirely in his first essays and never betrayed himself afterwards, it is the author of Ossi di Seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), Le Occasioni (The Occasions, 1939) and Finisterre (1942). And this Conradian attitude is fully recognizable in the stoical Montale of La Bufera e Altro (The Storm and Other Things), published in Venice by Neri Pozza in 1956. Montale never wavered in his style, and thanks to this firmness of expression has been able to face his psychological, moral and metaphysical worries without disintegrating either...