In 1948, the poet Eugenio Montale published his Quaderno di traduzioni and created an entirely new Italian literary genre, the "translation notebook." The quaderni were the work of some of Italy's foremost poets, and their translation anthologies proved fundamental for their aesthetic and cultural development.

Modern Italian Poets shows how the new genre shaped the poetic practice of the poet-translators who worked within it, including Giorgio Caproni, Giovanni Giudici, Edoardo Sanguineti, Franco Buffoni, and Nobel Prize-winner Eugenio Montale, displaying how the poet-translators used the quaderni to hone their poetic techniques, experiment with new poetic metres, and develop new theories of poetics.

In addition to detailed analyses of the work of these five authors, the book covers the development of the quaderno di traduzioni and its relationship to Western theories of translation, such as those of Walter Benjamin and Benedetto Croce. In an appendix, Modern Italian Poets also provides the first complete list of all translations and quaderni di traduzioni published by more than 150 Italian poet-translators.