Inaugural Address.- ¿Poetics at the Creative Crucibles¿ Offering New Guidelines for Literary Interpretation.- I Plurivocal Poiesis of the Airy Elements.- Empedocles: The Phenomenology of the Four Elements in Literature.- Fire in Goethe¿s Work: Neptunism and Volcanism.- The Tempestuous Conflict of the Elements in Baroque Poetry and Painting.- Fire Transfigured in T. S. Eliot¿s Four Quartets.- Fire and Snow: The Dichotomies and Dichomachies of Polish Baroque Poetry.- II The Metamorphic Poiesis of Air.- Temporality Puts on Airs: Process, Purpose, and Poetry in Shakespeare¿s Histories.- Filles de l¿air.- Concretizations of the Aeolian Metaphor.- III The Aesthetic Forces of the Airy Elements.- Le th¿ de l¿air dans la po¿e de Paul-Marie Lapointe.- ¿L¿Etre contre le vent¿: Aspects du vent dans la po¿e de Paul Val¿.- ¿Le Ciel est mort¿: Mallarm¿nd a Metaphysics of (Im)Possibility.- IV The Elemental Fire and the Poetic Transfiguration of Reality.- Man against Fire: Alfred D¿blin¿s Utopian Novel Mountains, Oceans and Giants.- ¿This Hard Gemlike Flame¿: Walter Pater and the Aesthetic Accommodation of Fire.- Thoreau¿s Waiden: The Pro-vocation of Fire.- Flannery O¿Connor: The Flames of Heaven and Hell.- V Fire, the Poetry of Elemental Passion.- From Fire to Fireworks in Baroque Poetry.- ¿Falling Fire¿: The Negativity of Knowledge in the Poetry of William Blake.- The Poetics of Fire in Jean Giono¿s Le Chant du Monde.- VI The Elemental Expanse.- Ruskin¿s Queen of the Air.- Breathless Messages: Phenomenology in Deep Space.- A Poetics of Space: William Bronk¿s Unhousing of the Universe.- Jean Giono¿s Le Chant du monde: The Harmony of the Elements.- VII The Significance of Literature and Related Topics.- The Significance of Literature According to Contemporary Writers.- The ¿Literature in Life¿ Philosophy vs. Reality: The Role of the River in Beppe Fenoglio¿s Il partigiano Johnny.- ¿The Origin of the Work of Art¿: Truth in Existence and the Scholastic Tradition.- The Ontology of Language in a Post-Structuralist Feminist Perspective: Explosive Discourse in Monique Wittig.- ¿re-dans-un-monde-litt¿ire.- Index of Names.