Top 25 Quotes by Salvatore Quasimodo

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.

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

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.

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.

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

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

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.

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.

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