he maintains that the poetic reimagining of stairs, passageways, porches or dressers brings together powers of memory, perception and fantasy that criss-cross in all kinds of surprising ways, sounding previously untapped “reverberations” (retentissements). Imagination is a laboratory of the possible inviting us—through reverie and poetry—to give a future to the past. And it is not just a matter of a private past (though Bachelard’s memories of his hometown of Bar-sur-Aube ghost his work) but of a shared reservoir of resonances bequeathed to us by the great poets from Homer and Ovid to Rilke
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