Howard Nemerov Quotes

Words can have no single fixed meaning. Like wayward electrons, they can spin away from their initial orbit and enter a wider magnetic field. No one owns them or has a proprietary right to dictate how they will be used.

Perhaps things are not things but words: metaphors, words for other things.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves.

I have every reason to believe that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language.

People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

We know the particular poem, not what it says that we can restate.

An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers.

The man who does not know other languages, unless he is a man of genius, necessarily has deficiencies in his ideas.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

Language is not simply a reporting device for experience but a defining framework for it.

I'm a victim of my metaphors.

No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.

The transparency of a metaphor displays the glint of truth. But if a metaphor is taken for a reality, it then becomes dense and masks the truth it is meant to display.

We use metaphors to express our own truths.

I find something very appealing about taking literature very literally.

Literally' - I'm not having it; people can't go around saying 'literally.' Otherwise, what's literal? There's not another word for literally: if it isn't figurative or metaphorical, what is it? It's literal: there's no substitute.

If you tell a story that's only allegory, then it doesn't help you at all. If it doesn't bring some emotional charge, then it's just talking about something.

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

It is very difficult to explain poetry. You have to understand the poetry and figure out your own take and your relatability.

A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.

Poetry is a kind of distilled insinuation. It's a way of expanding and talking around an idea or a question. Sometimes, more actually gets said through such a technique than a full frontal assault.

. . . all meaning comes from analogies.

We are tied down to a language which makes up in obscurity what it lacks in style.