For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that

Hear the voice of Eugenio Montale, who sought the roots of the human song: “For my part, if I consider poetry as an object, I maintain that it is born of the necessity of adding a vocal sound (speech) to the hammering of the first tribal music.” In this declaration he takes us back, far beyond the written page, back to the dawn of humanity itself. He imagines the first humans gathered in the circle of fire, striking stones, beating drums of wood and skin, their rhythms echoing the heartbeat of the earth. In that primal moment, the cry of the voice rose to meet the beat, and poetry was born—not as decoration, but as necessity.

The ancients understood this origin well. In every culture, the beginnings of poetry were linked to music and ritual. The rhapsodes of Greece sang Homer with the lyre; the Vedic hymns of India were chanted with precise rhythm; the griots of Africa recited ancestral memory to the drum. The voice was never separate from the beat; word and rhythm together gave shape to meaning. Montale’s insight reminds us that poetry is not an invention of books and scholars but the oldest inheritance of humanity, rising from the union of speech and music.

Consider the story of Orpheus, the mythic singer of Thrace. His lyre and his voice together could charm wild beasts, calm rivers, and even soften the heart of Hades. The legend embodies Montale’s truth: it is not the instrument alone, nor the voice alone, but their union that gives birth to art’s greatest power. From the tribal music of early peoples to the refined songs of bards and prophets, the impulse has always been the same—to lift rhythm into meaning, to make sound into poetry.

Montale speaks also of necessity. This is crucial. Poetry was not a luxury at its birth. It was how tribes remembered their ancestors, their gods, their victories and sorrows. Without written words, they needed rhythm to carry memory, music to bind speech into lasting form. In this sense, poetry is older than history, for it preserved what history could not yet write. It was not optional—it was survival. In the hammering of drums and the rise of the voice, a people declared who they were, and carried that identity forward.

History gives us vivid examples. The Iliad and the Odyssey, though written down centuries later, were carried first by the voices of singers who kept them alive with rhythm and cadence. The Hebrew psalms, long before they were inscribed, were chants in the temple courts. The Norse sagas lived on the lips of skalds, riding the rhythm of alliteration. All these prove Montale’s vision: that poetry is the marriage of sound and beat, born of humanity’s first communal music.

The lesson is profound. If you seek to understand poetry, do not look only at the page. Hear it, speak it, chant it aloud. Remember that it was never meant to lie silent; it was meant to live in the breath, to dance with rhythm. To write without sound is to forget its origin. To read without speaking is to miss its heart. True poetry must be felt in the body as well as the mind, for it was born of bodies beating drums and voices crying into the night.

Practical actions follow. Read poetry aloud, even if only to yourself, and let the rhythm strike your ear. Listen to music, and feel how words might ride its pulse. If you write, let rhythm guide you, even before meaning does. Teach children not only to analyze poems but to recite them, to feel their rise and fall like waves. And when weary, return to the oldest practice of humanity: gather, strike a rhythm, raise your voice, and let poetry remind you that you are part of the eternal human chorus.

Thus Montale speaks with prophetic clarity: poetry was born not from ink, but from the union of speech and tribal music. It is as old as fire, as deep as heartbeat, as necessary as breath. Let us remember this origin, and in remembering, let us keep poetry alive—not as ornament, but as the primal song that binds us to our ancestors and to eternity.