On Poetic Imagination and Reverie

Passages from bachelard's major works are introduced here in excerpts selected by Colette Gaudin, a professor of French literature at Dartmouth College and an authority on Bachelard.


The Poetics of Space

In bachelard’s enchanting spaces,  “we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost. This new edition features a foreword by Mark Z. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery.

Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. A beloved multidisciplinary treatise comes to penguin ClassicsSince its initial publication in 1958, psychologists, critics,  The Poetics of Space has been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, and readers alike.

Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. With more than 1, 500 titles, penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines.

. Danielewski, whose bestselling novel house of leaves drew inspiration from Bachelard’s writings, and an introduction by internationally renowned philosopher Richard Kearney who explains the book’s enduring importance and its role within Bachelard’s remarkable career.


The Magus

There, his friendship with a reclusive millionaire evolves into a mysterious--and deadly--game of violence, seduction, and betrayal. He becomes a desperate man fighting for his sanity and his very survival. John fowles expertly unfolds a spellbinding exploration of the complexities of the human mind.

By turns disturbing, thrilling and seductive, The Magus is a masterwork of contemporary literature. Widely considered john Fowles's masterpiece, The Magus is "a dynamo of suspense and horror. A dizzying, electrifying chase through the labyrinth of the soul. Read it in one sitting if possible-but read it" New York Times.

A young englishman, nicholas Urfe, accepts a teaching post on a remote Greek island in order to escape an unsatisfactory love affair. As he is drawn deeper into the trickster's psychological traps, Nicholas finds it increasingly difficult to distinguish past from present, fantasy from reality.


A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry

An acute and deeply insightful book of essays exploring poetic form and the role of instinct and imagination within form—from former poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning author Robert Hass. Robert hass—former poet laureate, and recipient of the pulitzer prize—illuminates the formal impulses that underlie great poetry in this sophisticated, winner of the National Book Award, graceful, and accessible volume of essays drawn from a series of lectures he delivered at the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

A little book on form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic and reflects his profound education in the art of poetry. Starting with the exploration of a single line as the basic gesture of a poem, and moving into an examination of the essential expressive gestures that exist inside forms, Hass goes beyond approaching form as a set of traditional rules that precede composition, and instead offers penetrating insight into the true openness and instinctiveness of formal creation.

A little book on form is a rousing reexamination of our longest lasting mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets.  .


Gaston Bachelard, Revised and Updated: Philosopher of Science and Imagination SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought

Comprehensive overview of the entire spectrum of works by one of twentieth-century France’s most original thinkers. Gaston bachelard, is known by english-language readers primarily as the author of The Poetics of Space and several other books on the imagination, one of twentieth-century France’s most original thinkers, but he made significant contributions to the philosophy and history of science.

Smith is professor emeritus of french at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet. Smith also explores the material and dynamic imagination associated with the four elements—fire, air, his Poetics of Reverie, water, and earth—and the phenomenology of creative imagination in Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, and in the fragments of Poetics of Fire.

Roch C. After an overview of bachelard’s writings on the scientific mind as it was transformed by relativity, and modern chemistry, quantum physics, Smith examines Bachelard’s works on the imagination in light of particular intellectual values Bachelard derived from science. In this book, Roch C. His trajectory from science to a specifically literary imagination is traced by recognizing his concern with what science teaches about how we know, and his increasing preoccupation with questions of being when dealing with poetic imagery.

Smith provides a comprehensive introduction to Bachelard’s work, demonstrating how his writings on the literary imagination can be better understood in the context of his exploration of how knowledge works in science.


The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination

His aim is not to produce a work of criticism or philosophy, or a mere discussion of poetic technique. As he explains in his introduction,  in the direction of disclosing "poetry itself, the naked poem, published in different times and places,  aimed higher than that, his ambition in these various pieces, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words.

Stevens proves himself as eloquent and scintillating in prose as in poetry, as he both analyzes and demonstrates the essential act of repossessing reality through the imagination. In this collection of essays, consummate poet Wallace Stevens reflects upon his art.


The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition Vintage International

His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert perennial fascination. In stephen mitchell’s versions of rilke’s two greatest masterpieces readers will discover an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity, fluency, and reach of his poetry. Stephen mitchell adheres impeccably to rilke’s text, and to the complexity of his thought; at the same time, to his formal music, Mitchell’s work has authority and power as poetry in its own right.

. Rilke is unquestionably the twentieth century’s most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation and spiritual quest. Available for the first time in a single volume, Ranier Maria Rilke’s two most beloved sequences of poems rendered by his most faithful translator.


Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology

He is the author of earthbodies: rediscovering Our Planetary Senses and Humans, Machines: Blurring Boundaries, Animals, both also published by SUNY Press. Mazis provides an overall consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy that brings out what he sees as a corrective prescription for ethical reorientation that is fundamental to Merleau-Ponty’s thought.

In the last part of the book, mazis traces the development of what he calls “physiognomic imagination” in Merleau-Ponty’s work. Assesses merleau-ponty’s contribution to ethics as calling for a poetic interplay between perception and imagination, and between silence and solidarity, that reveals our place in the world, and our obligations to ourselves and others.

Before his death in 1961, merleau-ponty worried about what he saw as humanity’s increasingly self-enclosed and manipulative way of experiencing self, others, and the world—the consequences of which remain apparent in our destructive inability to connect with others within and across cultures. Drawing on merleau-ponty’s published works, lecture notes, gaston bachelard, and the work of many phenomenologists and Merleau-Ponty scholars, Mazis also offers incisive readings of Merleau-Ponty’s work as it relates to that of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, unpublished writings, and Emmanuel Levinas.

Glen A. This understanding of imagination is not fancy or make-believe, but rather brings out the depths of perceptual meaning and leads to an appreciation of poetic language as the key to revitalizing both ethics and ontology. Mazis begins by analyzing the key role that silence plays for Merleau-Ponty as a positive, powerful presence rather than a lack or emptiness, and then builds on this to explore the ethical significance of the face-to-face encounter in his thought as one of solidarity rather than obligation.

Mazis is professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Penn State Harrisburg.


The Space of Literature: A Translation of "L'Espace littéraire"

Blanchot's discussions of those writers are among the finest in any language. From the 1930s through the present day, his writings have been shaping the international literary consciousness. In it he reflects on literature and the unique demand it makes upon our attention. Maurice blanchot, the eminent literary and cultural critic, has had a vast influence on contemporary French writers—among them Jean Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida.

This book consists not so much in the application of a critical method or the demonstration of a theory of literature as in a patiently deliberate meditation upon the literary experience, Rilke, informed most notably by studies of Mallarmé, Kafka, and Hölderlin. The space of literature, first published in France in 1955, is central to the development of Blanchot's thought.

Thus he explores the process of reading as well as the nature of artistic creativity, to history, all the while considering the relation of the literary work to time, and to death.


Henry von Ofterdingen: A Romance Dover Thrift Editions

This edition features a Life of the Author and an Afterword by Ludwig Tieck. He travels the world in pursuit of his dream, discovering that poetry is everywhere for those who can perceive it. Author friedrich von hardenberg ― better known as Novalis 1772–1801 ― was a poet and philosopher who worked closely with Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck.

The young hero of this unfinished experimental novel envisions a blue flower that represents desire, love, and the metaphysical longing for the infinite. Lewis and George R. Martin. S. Novalis's influence extended to hermann hesse and Jorge Luis Borges, and the "blue flower" motif that he originated in Henry von Ofterdingen has appeared in the works of C.

A gem of german romanticism, this literary landmark continues to enchant readers with its combination of poetic and fairy tale elements. R.


The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination

Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. First published in 2004.