This article examines cognitive metaphor as a mechanism of literary thinking and a means of representing knowledge structures in literary text from the perspectives of cognitive linguistics and cognitive poetics. While traditional stylistics has predominantly treated metaphor as a rhetorical device that provides imagery and expressiveness, the cognitive approach regards metaphor as a fundamental mechanism through which human beings conceptualize reality, structure abstract experience, and construct new knowledge. The study draws on selected metaphorical contexts from some English works. The methodology combines conceptual, contextual, and cognitive–semantic analysis, source–target domain mapping, and metaphor identification procedure. It is argued that cognitive metaphor does not merely verbalize pre–existing knowledge; it activates, restructures, and generates knowledge structures in the readerʼs mind. Therefore, metaphor functions as an essential cognitive instrument of literary imagination and interpretation. Alongside this, metaphor is examined as a product of human thought and as a means of creating artistic and aesthetic imagery in the mind. The role of cognitive linguistics in literary texts and the authorʼs individual style are systematically analyzed. Materials from English literature are studied within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory.