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
One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.
Interpretation
Reading poetry requires full attention and immersion in the experience.
This quote by Gaston Bachelard emphasizes the necessity of being fully present and engaged when reading poetry. It suggests that true appreciation of poetry cannot occur if one's mind is distracted by other thoughts, highlighting the importance of focus and the immersive nature of poetic experiences.
In practice
In a literature class, a teacher can use this quote to stress the importance of being present while analyzing poems.
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.
Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
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.
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
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.
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.
She stood lost in eternity wearing a crazy dress, watching the immense sky.
As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.
What's the point of rap if you can't be yourself, huh?
It is only when I am doing my work that I feel truly alive.
It is not a torment to be an artist. It is a privilege.
'Let the music play on' would be my legacy.
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