Life & Wisdom Quote by Salvatore Quasimodo

There is a deliberate cruelty in the image: the poet reduced to a circus act, stranded in the provinces, teeth smashed by the very performance he’s expected to keep delivering. Quasimodo’s line isn’t just lamenting marginalization; it’s exposing a cultural arrangement where poetry is tolerated as spectacle but denied real authority. The “them” is doing quiet damage here. It’s faceless, bureaucratic, metropolitan - the arbiters who decide what counts as serious culture and what can be safely exiled to the periphery.

The “syllabic trapeze” is the masterstroke. It turns craft into risk: poetry becomes a high-wire trick where precision is demanded, applause is conditional, and failure is bodily. The mouth - the instrument of speech and song - is broken, suggesting censorship, self-censorship, or the internal erosion that comes from performing beauty inside a system that doesn’t want to hear it. Quasimodo, a Nobel-winning poet who lived through Fascism, war, and the postwar churn of Italian public life, writes from a century where language was routinely conscripted for propaganda. In that context, insisting on lyric integrity could feel like an act of defiance that exacts a physical toll.

Under the bitterness is a critique of center-periphery politics: the province as cultural quarantine, the poet as both entertainer and threat. The line works because it makes aesthetic labor visceral. It doesn’t ask for pity; it shows the bruise.