Life & Wisdom Quote by Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry, Quasimodo suggests, is less a private diary than a contraband courier service: the poet smuggles something “interior and personal” across the border of the self and it arrives, intact, in a stranger’s hands. The line’s quiet trick is its pivot from belief to recognition. The poet “believes” the feeling is uniquely his; the reader “recognizes” it as already theirs. That shift exposes a mild narcissism at the heart of artistic making (my pain is unprecedented) and then punctures it with poetry’s democratic punchline (no, it’s shared).

The intent isn’t to flatter poets as rare sensitives; it’s to define the craft as translation. Not translation from one language to another, but from the inarticulate to the speakable, from raw interior weather to a shape that can be inhabited by someone else. “Revelation” matters here: it implies discovery, not invention, as if the poem reveals the feeling to the poet at the same moment it reveals the reader to themselves.

Quasimodo’s context sharpens the stakes. A Nobel-winning Italian poet marked by war, fascism, and postwar rubble, he lived in a century where private feeling was routinely conscripted by public ideologies. This formulation insists on a counter-power: lyric as an underground network of empathy, capable of bypassing propaganda’s loud generalities. The subtext is bracingly ethical: if your “personal” truth can’t be recognized by others, it’s not yet poetry; it’s just autobiography with line breaks.