"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"
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Perfection, for Quasimodo, is a kind of extinction. The dream of reproducing a person exactly in poetry is not just technically hard; it would be "a negation of the earth" because it denies the world’s stubborn materiality. A man on the page can never be the man in weather, history, breath, and accident. To claim otherwise is to pretend language can replace lived reality, turning art into a counterfeit universe that cancels the original.
The line also smuggles in a moral warning. Quasimodo grants the poet a "greatest desire" that feels almost democratic: to speak to many, to join them through "harmonious verses" about mental and worldly truths. But he refuses the easiest route to that communion: mimicry. Exact duplication would be an "impossibility of being" because the self you capture becomes a static specimen, pinned like an insect, while the real person keeps changing. Art that promises total fidelity ends up freezing life and calling it connection.
The context matters: Quasimodo’s career runs through Italian Hermeticism and into the shattering mid-century reality of war and fascism. After catastrophe, the idea that language can transparently mirror human beings looks not innocent but dangerous, a cousin to propaganda’s slick certainty. His subtext is that poetry’s task is not to clone the human, but to meet it obliquely: to build a shared music that admits its limits while still reaching, insistently, toward common truth.
The line also smuggles in a moral warning. Quasimodo grants the poet a "greatest desire" that feels almost democratic: to speak to many, to join them through "harmonious verses" about mental and worldly truths. But he refuses the easiest route to that communion: mimicry. Exact duplication would be an "impossibility of being" because the self you capture becomes a static specimen, pinned like an insect, while the real person keeps changing. Art that promises total fidelity ends up freezing life and calling it connection.
The context matters: Quasimodo’s career runs through Italian Hermeticism and into the shattering mid-century reality of war and fascism. After catastrophe, the idea that language can transparently mirror human beings looks not innocent but dangerous, a cousin to propaganda’s slick certainty. His subtext is that poetry’s task is not to clone the human, but to meet it obliquely: to build a shared music that admits its limits while still reaching, insistently, toward common truth.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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