35 Quotes by Salvatore Quasimodo

The enemy of the Resistance, for all his shouting, is today only a shadow, without much strength. His voice is more impersonal than his proposals.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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