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 pr...”

“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...”

“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...”

“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.”

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

“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 fo...”

“A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.”

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

“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.”

“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 propheti...”

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