The Poetics of Space

As for me, being an addict of felicitous reading, I only read and re-read what I like, with a bit of reader’s pride mixed in with much enthusiasm. But whereas pride usually develops into a massive sentiment that weighs upon the entire psyche, the touch of pride that is born of adherence to the felicity of an image remains secret and unobtrusive. It is within us, mere readers that we are, it is for us, and for us alone. It is a homely sort of pride. 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.

Bachelard offers a poetics of both matter and form, whereas Aristotle had originally defined poetics in terms of formal properties of plot (muthos) and imitation (mimesis). Poetics comes from poiesis, meaning “to make,” and for Bachelard this is a two-way process: we are made by material images that we remake in our turn.

Just as stanza means “verse,” it also means “room.”

The Poetics of Space is one of those books in the tradition of Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions, Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet, and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. Whether

On the shelves of memory and in the temples of the wardrobe

imagination were entirely metaphorical. Now a metaphor gives concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express.

snow, especially, reduces the exterior world to nothing rather too easily. It gives a single color to the entire universe

well-determined centers of revery are means of communication between men who dream as surely as well-defined concepts are means of communication between men who think.