The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

For you without imagination, who can matter-of-factly claim that you’re not the creative type—mind you, not proudly claim; for an imagination of ruin must burn beneath defiances against personal invention—then best put this book down and seek out instead some almanac of entertainment free from all such catalytic risks to a mind just mad enough to make out of one world another world.

In fact it’s hard, over the course of even one reading, not to detect the warmth of that rare personality who unmakes a thief simply by making every article of interest available.

have sat at tables crowded with journalists, graphic artists, urban planners, therapists, sculptors, and architects, all of whom carry some fond memory of their first encounter with The Poetics of Space.

bruised desire.

in prolonging exaggeration, we may have the good fortune to avoid the habits of reduction.”

That which we don’t know provokes what we just might conjure.

How does the increased fluency of language direct eccentricity in life?

He values the imagination because he recognizes that understanding without imagination is doctrine without growth. And without growth, what chance is there to engage the complexity that bounds us?

too.

Imagination is the light that emanates from a source of information, the sun without light has no value but heat, science without imagination is trudging anger, a lack of beauty.

if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated image;

The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language.

a philosophy of poetry must be given the entire force of the vocabulary,

The vocal importance alone of a word should arrest the attention of a phenomenologist of poetry. The word “soul” can, in fact, be poetically spoken with such conviction that it constitutes a commitment for the entire poem.

But here it is a painter speaking, a producer of lights. He knows from what heat source the light comes. He experiences the intimate meaning of the passion for red.

One would not be able to meditate in a zone that preceded language.

For nothing prepares a poetic image, especially not culture, in the literary sense, and especially not perception, in the psychological sense.

the literary critic who, as has frequently been noted, judges a work that he could not create and, if we are to believe certain facile condemnations, would not want to create. A literary critic is a reader who is necessarily severe.

As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader’s pride mixed in with much enthusiasm.

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

We can admire more or less, but a sincere impulse, a little impulse toward admiration, is always necessary if we are to receive the phenomenological benefit of a poetic image.

emerging.

poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity.

the intense life of language.

Even

reflection

There is no need to have lived through the poet’s sufferings in order to seize the felicity of speech offered by the poet—a felicity that dominates tragedy itself.

A psychoanalyst can of course study the human character of poets but, as a result of his own sojourn in the region of the passions, he is not prepared to study poetic images in their exalting reality.

Knowing must therefore be accompanied by an equal capacity to forget knowing. Non-knowing is not a form of ignorance but a difficult transcendence of knowledge.

if there exists a skill in the writing of poetry, it is in the minor task of associating images.

If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.

The space of hatred and combat can only be studied in the context of impassioned subject matter and apocalyptic images.

verify,

imagination augments the values of reality.

judgments and daydreams react.

For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.

We live fixations, fixations of happiness.1 We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream,

In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant rôles.

Psychoanalysis too often situates the passions “in the century.” In reality, however, the passions simmer and resimmer in solitude: the passionate being prepares his explosions and his exploits in this solitude.

And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep, when we attain to the regions of deep slumber, we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial.

the unconscious is housed.

psychoanalysis comes to the assistance of the ousted unconscious, of the unconscious that has been roughly or insidiously dislodged. But psychoanalysis sets the human being in motion, rather than at rest. It calls on him to live outside the abodes of his unconscious, to enter into life’s adventures, to come out of himself.

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived. These drawings need not be exact. They need only to be tonalized on the mode of our inner space.

Space calls for action, and before action, the imagination is at work.

Over-picturesqueness in a house can conceal its intimacy. This is also true in life. But it is truer still in daydreams.

We can perhaps tell everything about the present, but about the past!

Memories of dreams, however, which only poetic meditation can help us to recapture, are more confused, less clearly drawn. The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams.

“Here the conscious acts like a man who, hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar, hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that the noise was pure imagination.

to the abode of a soul that believes in heaven.