War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost.

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...

Religious poetry, civic poetry, lyric or dramatic poetry are all categories of man’s expression which are valid only if the endorsement of formal content is valid.

We wrote verses that condemned us, with no hope of pardon, to the most bitter solitude.

A poet clings to his own tradition and avoids internationalism.

Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral.

In opposition to this detachment, he finds an image of man which contains within itself man’s dreams, man’s illness, man’s redemption from the misery of poverty – poverty which can no longer be for him...

According to them, the poet is confined to the provinces with his mouth broken on his own syllabic trapeze.

The antagonism between the poet and the politician has generally been evident in all cultures.

But one did not do feminist theory, as such, in those days, not only because male academic discourse did not recognize such a term, but especially because the women’s movement did not either.

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...

The enemy of the Resistance, for all his shouting, is today only a shadow, without much strength. His voice is more impersonal than his proposals.

Many Italians today refer to themselves as citizens of a Third World country, which they are in many ways, not simply economically.

As the poet has expected, the alarms now are sounded, for – and it must be said again – the birth of a poet is always a threat to the existing cultural order, because he...

The poet does not fear death, not because he believes in the fantasy of heroes, but because death constantly visits his thoughts and is thus an image of a serene dialogue.

The hero, the mythical subject, is constructed as human being and as male; he is the active principle of culture, the establisher of distinction, the creator of differences.

Europeans know the importance of the Resistance; it has been the shining example of the modern conscience.

The poet’s other readers are the ancient poets, who look upon the freshly written pages from an incorruptible distance. Their poetic forms are permanent, and it is difficult to create new forms which can approach...

The state of the world, of course, is constantly changing, and so is theory.

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.

The poet’s spoken discourse often depends on a mystique, on the spiritual freedom that finds itself enslaved on earth.

To say it another way, thinking, however abstract, originates in an embodied subjectivity, at once overdetermined and permeable to contingent events.

From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue.

The Resistance is a moral certainty, not a poetic one. The true poet never uses words in order to punish someone. His judgment belongs to a creative order; it is not formulated as a prophetic...

While farmers generally allow one rooster for ten hens, ten men are scarcely sufficient to service one woman.

He passes from lyric to epic poetry in order to speak about the world and the torment in the world through man, rationally and emotionally. The poet then becomes a danger.

The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.

Do as we say, and not as we do.

My readers at that time were still men of letters; but there had to be other people waiting to read my poems.

Thus, the poet’s word is beginning to strike forcefully upon the hearts of all men, while absolute men of letters think that they alone live in the real world.

After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question.

Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.