Inaugural Study.- The Aesthetics of Nature in the Human Condition.- I The Poetics of the Sea as an Element in the Human Condition: Literary Interpretation.- A. Resoundings of the Sea in the Elemental Twilight of the Human Soul.- Death or Life of the Spirit: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner ¿ Thalassian Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.- The Waves of Life in Virginia Woolf¿s The Waves.- On the Shores of Nothingness: Beckett¿s Embers.- Ego Formation and the Land/Sea Metaphor in Conrad¿s Secret Sharer.- Wordsworth: The Sea and Its Double.- El mistico significado del mar (en el lenguaje poetico).- B. Man¿s Elemental Response to the Vital Challenge at the Cross Section of Ancient Cultures.- Between Land and Sea: The End of the Southern Sung.- Hesiodic Fable and Weather Lore: Text and Context in Figurative Discourse.- The Response of Biblical Man to the Challenge of the Sea.- The Sea as Metaphor: An Aspect of the Modern Japanese Novel.- C. The Poetic Inspiration of the Sea in Literary Experience.- The Poetic and Elemental Language of the Sea.- The Sea as Medium for Artistic Experience.- Las dimensiones po¿cas del mar y la idea del tiempo.- The Oneiric Valorization of the Sea: Instances of Poetic Sensibility and the ¿Non-Savoir¿.- Figuring the Elements: Trope and Image in Shakespeare.- D. The Watery Mirror of the Elemental.- Mirror Reflections: The Poetics of Water in French Baroque Poetry.- The St. Lawrence in the Poetry of Gatien Lapointe.- II The Elemental Thread in the Twilight of Consciousness, The Ciphering of Life-Significance in the Poiesis of Art ¿ From Interpretation to Theory.- A. On the Brink.- On the Brink: The Artist and the Sea.- The Rapture of the Deep.- The Voices of Silence and Underwater Experience.- A Contrast Between the Sea and the Mountain: A Comparative Study of Occidental and Chinese Poetic Symbolism.- B. The Shorelines: Elemental Moves in the Twilight of Consciousness.- Literal/Littoral/Littorananima: The Figure on the Shore in the Works of James Joyce.- Already Not-Yet: Shoreline Fiction Metaphase.- Thalassic Regression: The Cipher of the Ocean in Gottfried Benn¿s Poetry.- Derrida and Husserl on the Status of Retention.- Nonlogical Moves and Nature Metaphors.- C. Poetic Discourse: ¿Reality¿ and the Retrieval of Life-Significance.- The Reading as Emotional Response: The Case of a Haiku.- Literature and the Ladder of Discourse.- The Sea in Faust and Goethe¿s Verdict on His Hero.- III Creative Orchestration in the Poiesis of Life and in Fiction.- Preamble.- What Makes Philosophical Literature Philosophical?.- Kaelin on Philosophical Literature.- The Hermeneutics of Literary Impressionism: Interpretation and Reality in James, Conrad, and Ford.- Hermeneutics and History: A Response to Paul Armstrong.- Index of Names.