1975 Nobel Prize in Literature

The 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions".^[1] He is the fifth Italian laureate for the literature prize.

Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, Eugenio Montale is associated with the poetic school of hermeticsm, the Italian variant of the French symbolism movement, although Montale himself did not consider himself to be part of the hermetic school. His poetry is often compared to T. S. Eliot. When the Swedish Academy awarded him with the Nobel Prize in 1975, they called him “one of the most important poets of the contemporary West”.^[2] His notable oeuvres include Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones", 1925), Le occasioni ("The Occasions", 1939), La bufera e altro ("The Storm and Other Things", 1956), Satura (1962–1970) (1971) and Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973).^[3]

Montale was first nominated for the prize in 1955 by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot. It was followed in 1961 and from 1966 he became a regular nominee. By 1973, the Nobel committee had received 23 nominations in total before Montale was eventually awarded.^[4]

In 1975, the Swedish Academy received nominations for 114 writers with 22 being from the Nobel Committee itself. Twenty-eight of the nominees were new recommendations such Chinua Achebe, Fernand Braudel, Dobrica Ćosić, Miloš Crnjanski, Mohammed Dib, Gabriel García Márquez (awarded in 1982), Wilson Harris, Masuji Ibuse, Tove Jansson, Naguib Mahfouz (awarded in 1988), Desanka Maksimović, Vasko Popa, Chaim Potok and Mary Renault. The oldest nominee was Estonian poet Marie Under (aged 92) and the youngest was the Irish poet Brendan Kennelly (aged 39). Since the establishment of the awarded, 1975 became the highest number of female contenders in a year with 13 nominees: Anna Banti, Simone de Beauvoir, Doris Lessing (awarded in 2007), Nadine Gordimer (awarded in 1991), Tove Jansson, Rina Lasnier, Desanka Maksimović, Kamala Markandaya, Victoria Ocampo, Mary Renault, Nathalie Sarraute, Anna Seghers and Marie Under.^[5]

The authors Peter Anson, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Kersti Bergroth, Arthur Herbert Dodd, Julian Huxley, Edward Hyams, Murray Leinster, Constance Malleson, Thomas H. Parry-Williams, Kate Seredy, Robert Cedric Sherriff, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Ivan Sokolov-Mikitov, Elizabeth Taylor and P. G. Wodehouse died in 1975 without having been nominated for the prize.

The members of the Nobel committee variously proposed Graham Greene, Saul Bellow (awarded in 1976), Doris Lessing (awarded in 2007) and Nadine Gordimer (awarded in 1991) as the recipients of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature, but struggled to agree on one candidate. A speech by Academy member and former Nobel committee member Henry Olsson on 25 September appears to have convinced the members of the Swedish Academy to agree on awarding the fifth shortlisted candidate, Eugenio Montale. As none of the committee members had placed him as their first proposal, Montale is said being a compromise second choice by the Swedish Academy.^[6]

According to the Associated Press, Montale said that award had overwhelmed him and made his life, "which was always unhappy, less unhappy."^[3]

In Italy, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Montale was positively received. Their Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, congratulated him, said that the award "consecrates the validity of your poetical and human message, and, in you, honors the Italian culture,"^[3] and President Giovanni Leone commented that his work's contained "tormented and lucid singling‐out of the anxieties and the aspirations of modern man."^[3]

At the award ceremony on 10 December 1975, Anders Österling of the Swedish Academy said:

"at his best Montale, with strict discipline, has attained a refined artistry, at once personal and objective, in which every word fills its place as precisely as the glass cube in a coloured mosaic. The linguistic laconicism cannot be carried any further; every trace of embellishment and jingle has been cleared away. When, for instance, in the remarkable portrait-poem of the Jewes Dora Markus, he wants to indicate the current background of time, he does so in five words: Distilla veleno una fede feroce (“A fierce faith distils poison”). In such masterpieces both the fateful perspective and the ingeniously concentrated structure are reminiscent of T.S. Eliot and “The Waste Land”, but Montale is unlikely to have received impulses from this quarter and his development has, if anything, followed a parallel path"^[7]

Eugenio Montale delivered his Nobel lecture on 12 December 1975. Entitled "Is Poetry Still Possible?", he spoke about the art of poetry and poetry's place in the modern world of mass communication.^[8]

• Award ceremony speech nobelprize.org
• Eugenio Montale Nobel lecture nobelprize.org