This volume brings together Roman Jakobson's most important theoretical writings on poetics. It includes the two now-classic texts "Linguistics and Poetics" and "The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry," as well as studies on realism in art, folklore, the relationship between poetry and society using Hussite poetry as an example, and on parallelism. In two comparative essays on Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak, Jakobson explicates for the first time the relationship between metaphor and metonymy, which would later play a key role in structuralism (especially in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan). Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) was part of the Russian Formalist circle in his youth but later joined the Structuralists. Through his influential work, he contributed to the evolution of structuralism from its originally linguistic roots.