American Metempsychosis -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- The Metempsychotic Mind -- Soul and the Historical Series -- Apprenticeship in Western and Indian Mysticism -- Transformability of Matter -- Poetry and the New Alchemy -- Unsettling the Metempsychotic Series -- The Double Consciousness -- Consciousness Divided -- Refiguring Platonic Ascent -- The Order of Time, the Order of Genesis -- The Fall of Uriel -- "Fate" and the Ring of Necessity -- Reading the Metempsychotic Text -- Ascendancy of the Textual Frame -- Prototypes of Perception I: Plato and Plotinus -- Prototypes of Perception II: Goethe and the Self- Eye -- "Experience" and the Dilemma of Perception -- The Emergent Figure of the Poet -- Writing the Metempsychotic Text -- " A Sort of Emerson Run Wild" -- American Consciousness and the Stalwart Heir -- Being's Mimetic Dilemma -- The Divided Self and its Bloody Crowning -- A Poetics of Personal Transcendence -- The New Poetry -- Ascent and the "Robust Soul" -- " On the Extremest Verge" -- The Flash of the Eye on the Page -- Deceptions of the Thrush -- At the End of the Mind -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.