What sort of concept is metaphor? The word itself is a metaphor; you can't attempt to explain its meaning without resorting to metaphor. And yet it seems like a sophisticated thing, a act of imagination freely engaged in, a higher level accomplishment. But here metaphor refers to fundamental ways of structuring experience in order to bring forth a world, something like the imposition of a topology, the most abstract set of basic relationships, on an unstructured set. Could this be conceivable if the set was not already structured? And of course you can do away with the underlying set and keep only the structuring which is sufficient to supply whatever think-like objects you need as they are demanded. Then you begin with the pure possibility of structurings (plural), a context of contexts for which the notion of a pure unstructured world, the ultimate starting point, is merely a particular ideal, or even a willful denial of an already pervasive and quite inhuman intelligence. Another way of saying this might be that language arises out of poetry and not the other way around, and this being so the nature of poetry is the deep mystery, inseparable from the nature of mind.