Quote by Eugenio Montale: “Poetry is the art of making the impossible seem inevitable.”

The best poems show you something — an emotion, a truth, an image — and make it feel like it could not have been said any other way. What seemed out of reach or inexpressible suddenly becomes obvious. That transformation from impossible to inevitable is what separates poetry from ordinary language.

Montale was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975, recognition that came after decades of writing under fascism and through the ruins of postwar Italy. His Nobel lecture reflected on the relationship between poetry and history in an age of mass media and political violence.

Italian poet and Nobel laureate, born in Genoa in 1896 and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975. His spare, melancholic poetry — especially the collections Ossi di seppia and La bufera — explored the human condition under fascism and modernity with compressed lyrical intensity.