Salvatore Quasimodo, (born Aug. 20, 1901, Modica, Italy—died June 14, 1968, Naples), Italian poet, critic, and translator. Originally a leader of the Hermetic poets, he became, after World War II, a powerful poet commenting on modern social issues. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959.

Between the mid-1930s and his death, Quasimodo published an astonishing range of translations, including a group of Lirici greci (1940); plays of the Greek tragic playwrights Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (collected in Tragici greci, 1963); poems of the Latin poets Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil; six plays of William Shakespeare; Molière’s Tartuffe; and the poetry of the 20th-century poets E.E. Cummings (United States) and Pablo Neruda (Chile). He edited two anthologies of Italian poetry and wrote many significant critical essays, collected in Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi(1960; The Poet and the Politician and Other Essays) and Scritti sul teatro (1961), a collection of drama reviews.