correlativo soggettivo

With the collection of verses Ossi di seppia, first published in 1925, the poet Eugenio Montale, the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature, made his debut on the 20th century Italian poetic scene. The collection contains texts written between 1918 and 1924 and is all set in the poet’s homeland, Liguria. The present study, written on the occasion of the Colloque International L’idée de nature dans les Littératures Romanes, held in Sofia University in 2006, investigates the pecu- liar bond that unites Montale’s youthful verses and the natural and geographical context in which they are set. In the bony verses (from the title: Cuttlefish bones) of the Ligurian, as Montale is occasionally called in an academic context, na- ture and landscape appear to be endowed with specific referential autonomy and their concrete depiction as well as function in the verses is justified and realized 110by virtue of the dialectical relationship between I and non-I depicted therein. The study is an in-depth, non-exhaustive approximation to the topic and takes its cue from the theoretical considerations on the essence and potentiality of depiction of the landscape phenomenon within literature, advanced by the scholar Michael Jakob in his 2005 volume Landscape and Literature. With regard to Montale’s sub- ject matter, specifically, the paper relies on interpretive achievements of leading Italian critics of the 20th century, penetrating, lucid readers of Montale’s early poetry. 

Keywords: Montale, nature, landscape, I and non-I, search for identity, correla- tive subjective