SOURCE: "The Poetry of Eugenio Montale," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXV, No. 3, Summer, 1977, pp. 411-29.

Fraser is an American educator and critic specializing in the works of William Shakespeare. In the following essay, he argues that Montale takes an agnostic stance in his poetry by raising issues without drawing conclusions: "Montale, venturing the question, doesn't venture an answer. No answer is likely, unless an irreducible surd."

My subject is Montale's poetry and the peculiar configuration that it makes.

Poems like Wallace Stevens's "The Ordinary Women" baffle exegesis, but when you say them over and over, they describe a configuration or form: "The lacquered loges hunddled there / Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay." Other poems such as "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" present difficulty which is all at the exegetical level. Only read what Pound has read or let the commentators do that for you; this superficial labor accomplished, the rest...