This book has three distinctive characteristics: (1) It offers a widely interdisciplinary perspective. (2) It provides a comprehensive view of poetry, with groups of chapters on the Sound Stratum of Poetry (rhyme patterns and gestalt theory, metre and rhythm, expressiveness and musicality of speech sounds); the Units-of-Meaning Stratum (semantic representation and information processing, metaphor, rhyme and meaning, literary synaesthesia); the World Stratum; Regulative Concepts (genre, period style, archetypal patterns); the Poetry of Orientation & Disorientation (experiential and mystic poetry versus poetry of emotional disorientation, and the grotesque); the Poetry of Altered States of Consciousness (hypnotic and ecstatic poetry); Critics and Criticism; and Cognitive Poetics vs. Cognitive Linguistics. (3) It goes into minute details of poetic texts, so as to account for subtle intuitions of readers. This updated, expanded second edition also includes samples from the author's later instrumental study of the rhythmical performance of poetry and the expressiveness of speech sounds, and includes three chapters responding to the later work of three cognitive linguists. The author, Reuven Tsur, is the 2009 recipient of the Israel Prize in the category of General Literature for his work in literary theory.