Salvatore Quasimodo Quotes

#1. The poet's spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#2. Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining example of the modern conscience.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#3. My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#4. The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic scripture.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#5. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#6. As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for - and it must be said again - the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he attempts to break through the circle of literary castes to reach the center.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#7. In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man's dreams, man's illness, man's redemption from the misery of poverty - poverty which can no longer be for him a sign of the acceptance of life.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#8. He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#9. Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed e subito sera
Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world,
pierced by a ray of sunlight,
and suddenly it's evening

Salvatore Quasimodo

#10. Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#11. Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#12. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#13. The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#14. The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#15. Even a polemic has some justification if one considers that my own first poetic experiments began during a dictatorship and mark the origin of the Hermetic movement.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#16. A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#17. At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#18. Thus, the poet's word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#19. The poet's other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach them.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#20. Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man's expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#21. An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#22. We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#23. The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#24. Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.

Salvatore Quasimodo

#25. No, you listen! All my life, you've told me that the world is a dark, cruel place. But now I see that the only thing dark and cruel about it is people like you!

Salvatore Quasimodo

#26. According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

Salvatore Quasimodo