Montale’s ‘I miraggi’ as Nostalgia for Modernism

In accepting the Nobel prize for literature in 1975 Montale posed the question of whether poetry was still possible in a culture, as he saw it, increasingly dominated by consumerism and mass media. He returned to the question in ‘I miraggi’, a poem written eighteen months later, which is both a highly allusive and subtle meditation on the nature and relationship of the different arts and a nostalgic evocation of the modernist epiphany.