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Bachelard, Gaston

In his evocative text The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard employs the notion of the “poetic image” to refer to that special epiphanic oneiric quality of language that brings about in the reader a vocative response. The power of a phenomenological text resides in this resonance that the word can affect in our understanding— including those reaches of understanding that are more pathic and thus less accessible to conceptual and intellectual rationality. The creative contingent positioning of words may give rise to evoked images that can move us: inform us by forming us and thus leave an effect on us. When this happens, says Gadamer (1996), then language touches us in the soul. Or, as Bachelard puts it, the reverberations bring about a change of being, of our personhood:

“The resonances [of a poetic image] are dispersed on the different planes of our life in the world, while the repercussions invite us to give greater depth to our own existence. In the resonance we hear the poem, in the reverberations we speak it, it is our own. The reverberations bring about a change of being . . . . [T]he poem possesses us entirely. This grip that poetry acquires on our very being bears a phenomenological mark that is unmistakable” (1964a, p. xviii).

 

Selected Readings:
Bachelard, G. (1964a). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bachelard, G. (1964b). The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bachelard, G. (1969). The Poetics of Reverie. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bachelard, G. (1983). Water and Dreams. Dallas: Pegasus.
Bachelard, G. (1988). Air and Dreams. Dallas: Pegasus.
Bachelard. G. (2013). Intuition of the Instant. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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