Though the number of possible metaphors seems infinite, the great recurring ones can be grouped into a small set of essential affinities: eyes and stars, women and flowers, time and rivers, life and dreams, death and sleep. Most striking new metaphors are variations on these ancient patterns rather than wholly original connections.
Poetry should be approached as spoken language, an oral and musical event, not as a thing silently decoded on the page. A line's power comes from its sound and cadence, so it works on us before and apart from any intellectual analysis of its meaning.
The aesthetic experience is the sense of an imminent revelation that does not quite arrive: beauty is the feeling of being on the verge of understanding something that never fully declares itself. This perpetual approach, not any delivered message, is what art actually gives us.
Borges predicts that the ancient function of the poet as teller of large heroic tales, lost when the novel displaced the epic, will revive because people have a permanent hunger for story and fable. He treats narrative, telling what happened, as a deeper and more enduring human need than the lyric or the analytical.