Poetry is filled with novel metaphors which look discordant at first. Novel metaphors create similarity. Where do created similarities come from? They are already present on the cognitive level. The creation is not arbitrary but constrained by the external world. This is the interaction view of cognition. The objective of the article is to present an interactionist approach to cognition that explicitly addresses its paradox and then to apply this approach to the problem of similarity-creating metaphors. Every metaphor involves a description and an object or a situation, real or imaginary, to which the description is intended to apply. The description itself is a concept network. Words represent concepts that are structurally interrelated in a certain way in a poem. It is similarity-creating metaphors that provide us a means to ungroup and regroup environments into different meaningful patterns. (Sabine De Knop)