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Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.
Gaston Bachelard
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Childhood influences us throughout our lives, and poets help us reconnect with that inner child.

This quote emphasizes the enduring impact of childhood on our adult selves, suggesting that the essence of those formative experiences remains with us throughout our lives. Gaston Bachelard highlights the role of poets as facilitators in rediscovering the joy and imagination of childhood, portraying it as a vital, unchanging part of our being that we can access and appreciate even as adults.

Themes

ChildhoodPoetryImaginationAdult LifeInner Child

In practice

Example use cases

In a workshop about creative writing, one might use this quote to encourage participants to draw on their childhood experiences for inspiration.

More from Gaston Bachelard

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
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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.
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Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.
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How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.
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The reverie we intend to study is poetic reverie. This is a reverie which poetry puts on the right track, the track an expanding consciousness follows. This reverie is written, or, at least, promises to be written. It is already facing the great universe of the blank page. Then images begin to compose and fall into place.
Gaston BachelardRead

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