Life & Wisdom Quote by Eli Khamarov

Poets don’t decorate language; they stage a jailbreak. Eli Khamarov’s line treats “definition” as an occupying force, something that claims words the way states claim territory: with paperwork, fences, and the comforting illusion of permanence. Calling poets “soldiers” is a deliberate provocation. It borrows the moral urgency of war to elevate an activity we’re trained to see as soft or extracurricular. The friction is the point: poetry as combat, not consolation.

The phrase “steadfast possession” slyly indicts anyone who benefits from fixed meanings - institutions, ideologies, even everyday certainty. Definitions are useful, but they’re also policing tools: they stabilize, exclude, simplify. Khamarov suggests that a word nailed down too tightly becomes obedient, predictable, easy to deploy in slogans. The poet’s job, then, is not to invent new vocabulary but to rescue the old words from becoming instruments of control.

The subtext is post-Soviet and post-modern in the best sense: a writer who has lived through systems where official language could be deadly serious, where the “correct” meaning was enforced. “Liberate” implies that meaning isn’t a neutral dictionary entry; it’s contested, negotiated, sometimes coerced. Poetry reopens the case. It returns ambiguity, metaphor, and contradiction - the messy freedoms that propaganda hates and bureaucracy can’t file.

Khamarov also smuggles in a paradox: poets “liberate” words from definition, yet they do it with words. The weapon is the very medium under siege. That’s why it works: it frames art not as escape from reality, but as resistance inside it.