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This chapter discusses the section on poetic logic in the New Science. Poetic logic, the first science of the first branch of the Tree of Poetic Sciences, is the direct counterpart of poetic metaphysics. It is also the first of the nine sciences that correspond to the nine Muses. Poetic logic is propaedeutic to the active sciences of poetic morals, economy, and politics, as well as the speculative poetic sciences of nature. This chapter examines Giambattista Vico’s concept of poetic logic and his articulation of a series of corollaries expounding various aspects of it in relation to poetic tropes, speech, languages and letters, style and song, law, and the art of topics. It also considers the four tropes identified by Vico: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony.

This chapter addresses prose poetry's distortion of space and time, exploring the effects created by prose poetry's simultaneously condensed and onrushing language. This is unlike lineated poetry because although lineated lyric poems, in particular, often create a sense of considerable compression and intensity, the relative abundance of white space in such works creates a countervailing sense that there is room to think and breathe. Prose poetry is also unlike prose fiction, in which the emphasis on narrative progression gives priority to a sense of directed forward movement through TimeSpace — an emphasis that is very different from the effects created by most prose poems. While a prose poem may create an impression of forward momentum as the grammar and sequencing of the prose poem's tightly packed sentences carry the reader forward, its poetic tropes simultaneously complicate or problematize any sense of one-way progression. As a result, prose poems usually yield for the reader a complex textual engagement in which ideas and motifs frequently fold back on themselves, or present unresolved issues for consideration.

In presenting Paterson’s sixth collection, Rain, this chapter identifies an intensification of the poet’s considerable formal ambitions. It argues that Paterson’s increased preference for metred and end-rhymed forms, combined with a pared-back diction and clarity, not only reveal an attempt to speak with greater directness, but to expose false divisions between order and disorder, form and formlessness, within poems whose stylistic qualities and thematic concerns co-exist in unusually productive tension. This is illustrated in relation to the book’s central themes: ‘the human trope’, an extension of Paterson’s concept of the human dream; and the idea that poetry itself is an always elegiac project, in which crafted language pursues clarity and permanence as a momentary stay against confusion. The chapter concludes that Paterson is a poet who is especially adept at making the poem a site for highly memorable new meaning-making: the truest realisation of poetry as a mode of knowledge.

This chapter concerns kissing, which has figured prominently in the love poetry tradition. A poem is the natural correlative to a kiss. Both are oral pleasures; both are simultaneously sensual and spiritual, providing satisfaction in themselves while also sublimating or substituting for more intimate forms of erotic contact. Above all, both reflect the many contradictions that cluster around love. Like a poem, a kiss both communicates and interferes with communication; it is both discrete and unbounded; it represents both union and separation. Beginning with Catullus and taking as its central figure the Renaissance poet Joannes Secundus, whose neoclassical Basia (Kisses) exerted a lasting influence, the chapter considers the structures that poets have consistently deployed to communicate the experience of a kiss, including not only rhyme but such tropes as chiasmus, parataxis, and polyptoton, all of which help figure forth the erotic tensions inherent in the act of kissing.