“Empty Silences”

T. S. Eliot and Eugenio Montale

Abstract

Eliot's "Silence" (1910) and Montale's "Forse un mattino andando in un'aria di vetro" (1923) record all extraordinary experience, a privileged epiphany, in short a "moment in and out of time," typical both of the young poet of St. Louis and of his younger Genoese counterpart, in their early search for the absolute. After giving an account of the poems' critical reception, the article stresses the mythical theme of initiation. The man who has undergone such an experience, like the "mystes" of classic tradition, is completely transformed by it. The essay also offers a stylistic, thematic, and inter­textual analysis of the poems, and argues that they prefigure much of the poetics of Eliot and Montale. Their beginning was already inscribed their end.