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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote discusses the creative process of poetry and how it guides an imaginative state of mind.
Gaston Bachelard's quote highlights the transformative power of poetry in inspiring 'poetic reverie,' a state of contemplation that leads to creativity and the formation of images. He suggests that this reverie directs an expanding consciousness toward the act of writing, where the blank page becomes a canvas for imagination, allowing images and thoughts to come together and manifest in written form.
Themes
PoetryReverieCreativityImaginationWriting
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a workshop on creative writing to inspire participants about the power of imagination.
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
Similar quotes
I wish you would recollect that Painting and Punctuality mix like Oil and Vinegar, and that Genius and regularity are utter Enemies and must be to the end of time.
Thomas GainsboroughRead
In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.
Edward AbbeyRead
Robin Williams was an airman, a doctor, a genie, a nanny ... and everything in between. But he was one of a kind.
Barack ObamaRead
You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.'
Tracy K. SmithRead
In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
Pearl S. BuckRead
Fashion passes, but style remains.
Coco ChanelRead