Abstract

Composed by Eugenio Montale in the last, feverish months of 1938, Accelerato features a strong, memorable syntactic and interrogative intensity. The essay presents a new and different reading of this text, with a particular emphasis on the 'you', which is crucial for the enunciative impetus of the poem. The identification of the 'you' with the author's sister Marianna, who died on 15 October 1938, is not merely anecdotal, but sheds fuller light on the whole poem, on its sentimental humus and its placement within "Le occasioni". It also allows us to trace links and similarities between "Accelerato" and subsequent poems in "La Bufera" ("L'arca", "A mia madre").