Roman Jakobson's 'Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry' (1981), that monumental work of his later years, together with its later additions, was and is a theoretical challenge both for General and Comparative Literature and for the study of individual literatures. However, the sovereign multilinguality of these linguistic analyses of poetry has not only resulted in their being received world-wide, but has also presented a seemingly insurmountable difficulty, as there is hardly a reader who is able to understand them all, let alone discuss them critically.

To remedy this situation no more and no less is the objective of this German edition of all of Jakobson's structuralist analyses of poems and his most important poetological essays, which have been translated and commentated by specialists from the appropriate areas of literary studies.

Hendrik Birus, International University Bremen; Sebastian Donat, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.