SOURCE: "The New Montale," in Books Abroad, Vol. 45, No. 4, Autumn, 1971, pp. 639-45.

In the following excerpt, Cambon states that Miscellany (Satura) departs from the style of Montale's earlier poetry.

The poet himself once intimated that his three major books of verse, Ossi di seppia (1925), Le occasioni (1939), and La bufera e altro (1956), had vaguely rehearsed a Dantesque pilgrimage finally rewarded by glimmers of paradise. If so, what place can this fourth book, Satura, take in the overall sequence? In what sense, if at all, can it go further than its predecessors and thus refocus the whole itinerary? These are no idle questions, especially with a writer like Eugenio Montale, who is chary of his word. We might have been forgiven if we had taken at face value the finality of "Provisional Conclusions" with which he chose to end his third volume in 1956; they did sound like poetical epitaphs. Then...