Includes index.

Part I: Five summarizing essays -- Definition of man -- Poetics in particular, language in general -- Terministic screens -- Mind, body and the unconscious -- Coriolanus and the delights of faction -- Part II: Particular works and authors -- Shakespearean persuasion: Antony and Cleopatra -- Timon of Athens and misanthropic gold -- Form and persecution in the Oresteia -- Goethe's Faust, Part I -- Faust II -- The ideas behind the imagery -- I, eye, ay -- concerning Emerson's early essay on "nature" and the machinery of transcendence -- "Kubla Khan," proto-surrealist poem -- Social and cosmic mystery: a passage to India -- Version, Con -, Per -, and In -- (thoughts on Djuna Barnes's novel Nightwood) -- The vegetal radicalism of Theodore Roethke -- William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963 -- Part III. Further essays on symbolism in general -- Rhetoric and poetics -- The thinking of the body (comments on the imagery of catharsis in literature) -- Somnia ad Urinandum: more thoughts on motion and action -- What are the signs of what? (a theory of "entitlement") -- Myth, poetry, and philosophy -- Medium as "message" -- A dramatistic view of the origins of language -- Formalist criticism: its principles and limits.