"At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds"
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A nuclear blast doesn’t just level buildings; it detonates the old agreement about what art is allowed to sound like. Quasimodo’s sentence is doing a quiet piece of moral triage: when “continuity” is ruptured by the first nuclear explosion, the inherited forms of poetry begin to look less like tradition and more like denial. His target isn’t beauty, exactly, but the ease with which beauty can become anesthesia.
“Formal sediment” is the key insult. Sediment is what settles when movement stops; it’s the residue of past life, not life itself. By describing poetic decorum as a deposit we can “recover,” Quasimodo suggests a post-catastrophe temptation to retreat into the safe rituals of craft: polished metrics, tasteful musicality, the comforting belief that art’s job is to preserve refinement. The subtext is that this kind of recovery would be a betrayal, a restoration project on the wrong ruins.
The historical pressure is palpable. Quasimodo is writing from a Europe that watched modernity industrialize death: fascism, the war, then the apocalyptic punctuation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, “preoccupation with poetic sounds” can read as fiddling while the world burns, except the fire is now scientific and total. His phrasing doesn’t forbid lyricism; it indicts lyricism as self-protective habit when it refuses to metabolize the new reality.
The intent, then, is a call for a different severity: poetry that doesn’t hide behind decorum, that risks uglier truths because history has already made them unavoidable.
“Formal sediment” is the key insult. Sediment is what settles when movement stops; it’s the residue of past life, not life itself. By describing poetic decorum as a deposit we can “recover,” Quasimodo suggests a post-catastrophe temptation to retreat into the safe rituals of craft: polished metrics, tasteful musicality, the comforting belief that art’s job is to preserve refinement. The subtext is that this kind of recovery would be a betrayal, a restoration project on the wrong ruins.
The historical pressure is palpable. Quasimodo is writing from a Europe that watched modernity industrialize death: fascism, the war, then the apocalyptic punctuation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After that, “preoccupation with poetic sounds” can read as fiddling while the world burns, except the fire is now scientific and total. His phrasing doesn’t forbid lyricism; it indicts lyricism as self-protective habit when it refuses to metabolize the new reality.
The intent, then, is a call for a different severity: poetry that doesn’t hide behind decorum, that risks uglier truths because history has already made them unavoidable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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