For several years, Don Paterson's website has announced a future publication under the heading Ars Poetica, implicitly associating his theory of poetry with Horace's epistle of that name, a poem that profoundly influenced European poetic thinking for many centuries. Paterson himself would no doubt disclaim any ambition to be Horace's equal, but, to judge from what has so far appeared of this venture, his project is no less bold in its aspirations: to establish, from the ground up, a new basis for thinking about how poems work, both for the poet and for the reader. At the time of writing, two substantial essays have appeared in Poetry Review, each composed of two parts. These do not, as do many published accounts by poets or critics of the machinery of poetry, travel over familiar territory one more time, reintroducing us yet again to the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, the role of imagery, the use of dramatic monologue, or the different types of prosodic foot; rather, they attempt to think afresh, with the aid of whatever findings of linguistics or other branches of scientific knowledge seem appropriate, about the fundamental elements of poetic writing. Unlike those many introductions to poetry, they are not designed for easy reading: the strenuousness of Paterson's engagement with the most basic features of poetry is continuously evident, in spite of the familiar unbuttoned breeziness of his style and the many memorable bons mots to be encountered along the way. The result is an impressive intervention in the age-old debate about the nature and function of poetry, unmatched among contemporary poets’ reflections on their art.

The two parts of the first double essay, ‘The Lyric Principle’, bear the individual titles ‘The Sense of Sound’ and ‘The Sound of Sense’, and are concerned, as these titles suggest, with the relation between the sounds of language and the kinds of meaning operative in the successful poem. Paterson begins with an account of poetry's origins that stresses two features: its use as a mnemonic device and the ascription to it of magical properties. These two features are at the heart of Paterson's ‘art of poetry’, which focuses both on the techniques that make language memorable and on the poetic power that can't be reduced to the exercise of technique.