Gaston Bachelard was a french scientist and philosopher of science in the lineage that achieved its final flower in Michel Foucault. He was at once a profoundly scientific and theoretical thinker and a highly poetic one, and he brought each tendency to work in examining the materials of the other.

Quotes
* Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.
* Words … are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in foreign commerce on the same level as the others, as the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves this is a poets life. To mount too high or descend too low is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together.
* Poetics of Reverie, p. 7-8—In contrast to a dream a reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated, it must be written, written with emotion and taste, being relived all the more strongly because it is being written down. Here, we are touching on the realm of written love. It is going out of fashion, but the benefits remain. There are still souls for whom love is the contact of two poetries, the fusion of two reveries…to tell a love, one must write. One never writes too much…

A realist of passion will see nothing there but evanescent formulas… (cf. [Stevens]’ sombreros?)
* Poetics of Reverie, p. 8—One can also understand the great value in establishing a phenomenology of the imaginary where the imagination is restored to its proper, all-important place as the principle of direct stimulation of psychic becoming. Imagination attempts to have a future. At first it is an element of imprudence which detaches us from heavy stabilities. We shall see that certain poetic reveries are hypothetical lives which enlarge our lives by letting us in on the secrets of the universe, a world takes form in our reverie, and this world is ours. This dreamed world teaches us the possibilities for extending our being within our universe. There is futurism in any dreamed universe. (cf. [Dewey])
* The Poetics of Reverie—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.
h2. Works

• Poetics of Reverie
• Psychoanalysis of Fire
  h2. Quotes
  bq. Poetic reverie….gives the I a non-I which belongs to the I: my my non-I. It is this “my non-I” which enchants the I of the dreamer and which poets can help us share. For my “I-dreamer,” it is this “my non-I” which lets me live my secret of being in the world. Upon being faced with a real world, one can discover in himself the being of worry. Then he is thrown into the world, delivered over to the inhumanity and the negativeness of the world, and the world is then the denial of the human. The demands of our reality function require that we adapt to reality, that we constitute ourselves os a reality and that we manufacture works which are realities. But doesn’t reverie, by its very essence, liberate us from the reality function? From the moment it is consisdered in all its simplicity, it is perfectly evident that reverie bears witness to a normal, useful, irreality function which keeps the human psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign non-self.
  bq. There are times in the life of a poet when reverie assimilates even the real. Then, what he perceives is assimilated. The real world is absorbed by the imaginary world. Shelly gives us a veritable phenomenological theorem when he says that imagination is capable of “making us create what we see.” (Bachelard, Poetics of Reverie, p. 13)
  
  category:writer theory literary