Salvatore Quasimodo Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”