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 BachelardRead
It is through the intentionality of poetic imagination that the poet's soul discovers the opening of consciousness common to all true poetry.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that true poetry arises from a deliberate and imaginative process that connects the poet's inner self with universal consciousness.
Gaston Bachelard highlights the significance of intentionality in the poetic process, suggesting that it is the creativity and imagination of the poet that allows for a deeper exploration of consciousness. This exploration is not just personal but resonates with a broader, shared understanding of what constitutes true poetry, emphasizing the universal nature of poetic expression and experience.
Themes
PoetryImaginationConsciousnessIntentionalityCreativity
In practice
Example use cases
During a poetry workshop, one might quote this to inspire emerging poets to delve deeper into their intentional creative processes.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes →Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
Gaston BachelardRead
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.
Gaston BachelardRead
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Gaston BachelardRead
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.
Gaston BachelardRead
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.
Gaston BachelardRead
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