"Linguistica sum; linguistici nihil a me alienum esse puto" (I am a linguist; I find nothing about language foreign to me). These words of Terence, aptly and famously paraphrased by Roman Jakobson, succinctly characterize Jakobson in every aspect of his life and work. His versatility and interests allowed him to produce works dealing with not only linguistics proper but with such topics as folklore, aphasia, communication theory, philology, Slavic epics, comparative mythology, Chinese verse, and the verbal art of (among others) William Shakespeare, William Blake, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Paul Klee, Boris Pasternak, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Charles Baudelaire. He investigated sound analysis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), prosody in diverse languages, and the history and culture of the Slavic-speaking peoples. A widely-read and creative thinker, Jakobson argued a mutual implication between culture and language; toward supporting that argument, Jakobson studied and wrote prodigiously on what sometimes appeared to...