The debut collection of Italy's greatest 20th-century poet (Nobel 1975) and a defining achievement of European modernism. Where Marinetti's Futurism celebrated speed and violence, Montale's Ligurian coast, its rocky coves and blinding light and salt smell, provided the terrain for a poetry of erosion, resistance, and the "negative absolute." His arid, exact language stripped away rhetoric and found what remained.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.