La poétique de la rêverie et de l'espace

We must listen to poets. — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.

A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream.

I am alone so I dream of the being who has cured my solitude, who would be cured by solitudes. With its life, it brought me the idealisations of life, all the idealisations which give life a double, which lead life towards its summits, which make the dreamer too live...

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie

The poetic image exists apart from causality.

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space