The Poetics of Space

by Gaston Bachelard

Call it a calculus of emotional continuity or a music that only the grieving can know because they chose to carry on: what

For language is both image and text.

The one tool we have capable of transcending both. Or as Bachelard so succinctly puts it, evoking childish delight over a discovery at the beach set against the immensity of ocean:

What an inspiring pleasure then—with all this attention to paths and interiors leading to greater intimacies—to at the same time be reintroduced again and again to the outside.

it is this enduring desire to heal that is the heart of The Poetics of Space

His imagination is endlessly hospitable.

“fertile laziness”

Without such nooks and crannies to muse and mope, to linger and loiter, there is nowhere to begin anew. No place for rapt attention.

His famous turn toward poetics began in the late thirties when Bachelard decided to supplement his work on scientific epistemology (almost thirteen volumes) with an exploration of the life of art and creation. He had become increasingly dissatisfied by what he called the “growing rationalism of contemporary science” and was eager to investigate the “ecstasy of the newness of the image.”

Poetics is about hearing and feeling as well as crafting and shaping.

Bachelard resisted both extremes.

For him imagination was at once receptive and creative—an acoustic of listening and an art of participation. The two functions, passive and active, were inseparable.

Not non-being but surplus-being: being as incessant birthing of newness through images.

Viewing the imagination as a portal to understaning "newness"-- both the known and the unknown.

Instead, he made a sustained effort to think always from the beginning—focusing on the micro-phenomenon of the poetic image “at the moment of its emergence” in the reader’s waking consciousness.

We are born poets whether we like it or not, though what we do with it is our singular responsibility.

But perhaps the most original contribution that The Poetics of Space makes to contemporary poetics is its exploration of the rapport between imagination and language.

It is here that Bachelard clarifies his bold claim that images “speak” the

emergence of being, setting verbs in motion and turning sensations into metaphors by inviti...

hermeneutic thinkers like Ricoeur with the claim that the image is a four-way relationship between author, reader, text and world.

To imagine going down into the water or wandering in the desert is to change space; and to change space is to change being.

Very often, then, it is in the opposite of causality, that is, in reverberation, which has been so subtly analyzed by Minkowski,1 that I think we find the real measure of the being of a poetic image.

I tried to consider images without attempting personal interpretation.

seemed to me to be an insufficient basis on which to found a metaphysics of the imagination.

this crisis on the simple level of a new image, contains the entire paradox of a phenomenology of the imagination, which is: how can an image, at times very unusual, appear to be a concentration of the entire psyche?

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

To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul.

outmoded,

veritable

They must participate in an inner light which is not a reflection of a light from the outside world.

oeuvre

In itself, revery constitutes a psychic condition that is too frequently confused with dream.

“commonplaces,” before the interior poetic light was turned upon it, it was a mere object for the mind. But the soul comes and inaugurates the form, dwells in it, takes pleasure in

It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it

at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.

Expression creates beinv

felicitous

But whereas pride usually develops into a massive sentiment that weighs upon the entire psyche, the touch of pride that is born of adherence to the felicity of an image remains

secret and unobtrusive. It is within us, mere readers that we are, it is for us, and for us alone. It is a homely sort of pride.

In any case, every reader who re-reads a work that he likes knows that its pages concern him.

A great verse can have a great influence on the soul of a language. It awakens images that had been effaced, at the same time that it confirms the unforeseeable nature of speech.

topoanalysis.

The study of the sites of our most intimate live

But the verse always has a movement, the image flows into the line of the verse, carrying the imagination along with it, as though the imagination created a nerve fiber.

the poetic image furnishes one of the simplest experiences of language that has been lived.

it is considered as an origin of consciousness,

sublimates

He sees and points out the poet’s secret sufferings. He explains the flower by the fertilizer.

he who knows, that is to say, who transcends, and names what he knows.”

polemical

Ne sutor ultra crepidam.

Even in an art like painting, which bears witness to a skill, the important successes take place independently of skill.

“An artist does not create the way he lives, he lives the way he creates.”