Politics & Power Quote by Salvatore Quasimodo

Quasimodo’s line lands like a weary field report from someone who has watched language get conscripted. Calling the clash between poet and politician “generally… evident in all cultures” is a sly move: it pretends to be anthropological, almost neutral, while smuggling in an accusation that the conflict is structural, not personal. The poet and the politician both work with words, but they answer to opposite incentives. One sharpens ambiguity to make reality more legible; the other sands it down to make reality governable.

The subtext is not that poets are purer or politicians are uniquely corrupt. It’s that power is allergic to the kind of speech that refuses to resolve into a slogan. Poetry traffics in double meanings, private griefs, and inconvenient textures - exactly the material politics tries to compress into programs, enemies, and “the people.” When Quasimodo says this antagonism appears “in all cultures,” he implies that every society, no matter its myths about harmony, eventually meets the same problem: art’s independence is a form of dissent, even when it isn’t trying to be.

Context matters. Quasimodo was an Italian poet who lived through Fascism and World War II, translating and writing under regimes that treated culture as a tool of national destiny. In that world, the poet isn’t just a sensitive observer; he’s a competing authority. The politician wants language to mobilize. The poet insists language should also hesitate, mourn, doubt. That insistence can look like obstruction to the state - and like survival to everyone else.