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 poéticas 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.