SOURCE: "Eugenio Montale," in Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, New York University Press, 1969, 235-329.

In the following excerpt, Cary explicates poems from Montale's "war-book," Land's End (Finisterre,).

Dismissed from the directorship of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in 1938—the year of "Notizie dall'Amiata"—and forced to take on a heavy load of translation (chiefly from the English language, mostly Shakespeare plays) in order to survive, Montale stayed in Florence and wrote the poems to be gathered in the small war-book called Finisterre.

With its pointed epigraph taken from Agrippa D'Aubigné's "À Dieu"

 Les princes n'ont point d'yeux pour voir ces grands merveilles,
Leurs mains ne servent plus qu'à nous persécuter…. 

Finisterre was unpublishable in the Italy of this tormented period. The manuscript was smuggled out to Switzerland where an edition of 150 copies was published in Lugano in 1943 just before the coup d'état of July 25th which...