Salvatore Quasimodo

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.