Selected, translated, and introduced by Colette Gaudin. Gaston Bachelard was considered one of the great minds of our times. His prodigious ability, displayed in twenty-three books and expressed in subtle, suggestive prose, has produced the single most important body of thought in the recovery of imagination in the twentieth century. These passages from his major works, their thematic organization, the authoritative prefaces by Colette Gaudin which place his work in the stream of current ideas, as well as the Bibliography of writings by and on Bachelard, together provide a concise introduction and brilliantly capture Bachelard's genius. --Spring Publications.

In this, his last significant work, an admired French philosopher provides extraordinary meditations on the relations between the imagining consciousness and the world, positing the notion of reverie as its most dynamic point of reference. In his earlier book, The Poetics of Space, Bachelard considered several kinds of "praiseworthy space" conducive to the flow of poetic imagery. In Poetics of Reverie he considers the absolute origins of that imagery: language, sexuality, childhood, the Cartesian ego, and the universe. Approaching the psychology of wonder from the phenomenological viewpoint, Bachelard demonstrates the aurgentative potential of all that awareness. Thus he distinguishes what is merely a phenomenon of relaxation from the kind of reverie which "poetry puts on the right track, the track of expanding consciousness"

The classic book on how we experience intimate spaces. "A magical book. . . . A prism through which all worlds from literary creation to housework to aesthetics to carpentry take on enhanced-and enchanted-significances. Every reader of it will never see ordinary spaces in ordinary ways. Instead the reader will see with the soul of the eye, the glint of Gaston Bachelard." -from the foreword by John R. Stilgoe 6473-4 / $15.00tx / paperback