The Sense of Form in Literature and Language demonstrates how form in language participates in and determines the meaning of literary texts. This entails seeing verse and prose as a structure, of which the building blocks are primarily linguistic, and taking the form of these building blocks to be part of the content. Shapiro analyzes representative texts and examples from Russian, English, Romance, Japanese, and ancient Greek literature.

He unifies his analyses of prose fiction and verse by treating language as the only sure repository of meaning. This insightful work offers a wide range of examples from many genres and traditions and a unified approach to literature and language that derives in part from a reliance on the semiotic perspective of Peirce's whole philosophy.