"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"
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A polemic, Quasimodo suggests, is not just a flare of temperament but a historically earned posture. The line opens with a defensive shrug - "Even" - as if he anticipates the reader's impatience with literary infighting. Then he counters: my combative tone has receipts. His earliest poems were forged "during a dictatorship", when speech is policed, art is watched, and the safest honesty often arrives disguised.
That context matters because Hermeticism in Italy was never merely an aesthetic preference for difficulty. It was a survival technique: compression, private symbolism, and deliberate opacity as a way to keep meaning intact while avoiding the regime's crude demand for legibility and propaganda. By calling his youthful work the "origin" of the Hermetic movement, Quasimodo both claims a founding role and hints at a paradox: a style often accused of retreating from politics may have been born from politics' ugliest pressure.
The subtext is a rebuttal to two criticisms at once. One is moral: that polemic is indulgent, a vanity project. The other is artistic: that Hermetic poetry is evasive, hermetically sealed from public life. Quasimodo flips both. Under dictatorship, "clarity" becomes a tool of the state, while ambiguity can be a form of witness. His justification isn't "I was right"; it's "I was formed". The sentence reads like an alibi and a manifesto: if the language looks sealed, remember what kind of air it was written in.
That context matters because Hermeticism in Italy was never merely an aesthetic preference for difficulty. It was a survival technique: compression, private symbolism, and deliberate opacity as a way to keep meaning intact while avoiding the regime's crude demand for legibility and propaganda. By calling his youthful work the "origin" of the Hermetic movement, Quasimodo both claims a founding role and hints at a paradox: a style often accused of retreating from politics may have been born from politics' ugliest pressure.
The subtext is a rebuttal to two criticisms at once. One is moral: that polemic is indulgent, a vanity project. The other is artistic: that Hermetic poetry is evasive, hermetically sealed from public life. Quasimodo flips both. Under dictatorship, "clarity" becomes a tool of the state, while ambiguity can be a form of witness. His justification isn't "I was right"; it's "I was formed". The sentence reads like an alibi and a manifesto: if the language looks sealed, remember what kind of air it was written in.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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