SOURCE: "An Invitation to Hope: Eugenio Montale," in Grand Street, Vol. 3, No. 1, Autumn, 1983, pp. 91-111.

An English educator and critic, Gifford has written extensively about Russian literature. In the following essay, he provides an overview of Montale's verse, noting a message of hope implicit in his works.

The critic Sergio Solmi, long acquainted with Eugenio Montale and much appreciated by him, opens an account of his poetry with these words:

 There were few things we believed in when young; but
among those few we certainly did believe in poetry.
["La poesia di Montale" (1957), in Scrittori negli anni, 1963] 

He spoke for a generation that had seen two different kinds of disaster befall Italy: the defeat and demoralization of Caporetto; the triumph, and the moral degradation following upon it, of Fascism. His statement recalls the question once put to Nadezhda Mandelstam by a woman teacher in the provinces: how was...