Gaston Bachelard 'The Poetics of Space' - WordPress.com

xxvi introductionalone. It is a homely sort of pride. Nobody knows thatin reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet.All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurtureand repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.When the page we have just read is too near perfection, ourmodesty suppresses this desire. But it reappears, nevertheless.In any case, every reader who re-reads a work that helikes, knows that its pages concern him. In Jean-PierreRichard's excellent collection of essays entitled Poesie etProfondeur (Poetry and Depth), there is one devoted toBaudelaire and one to Verlaine. Emphasis is laid on Bau"elaire,however, since, as the author says, his work "concernsus." There is great difference of tone between the two essays.Unlike Baudelaire, Verlaine does not attract completephenomenological attention. And this is always the case.In certain types of reading with which we are in deep sympathy,in the very expression itself, we are the "beneficiaries."Jean-Paul Richter, in Titan, gives the following descriptionof his hero: "He read eulogies of great men with as muchpleasure as though he himself had been the object of thesepanegyrics."! In any case, harmony in reading is inseparablefrom admiration. We can admire more or less, but asincere impulse, a little impulse toward admiration, is alwaysnecesssary if we are to receive the phenomenologicalbenefit of a poetic image. The slightest critical considerationarrests this impulse by putting the mind in secondposition, destroying the primitivity of the imagination. Inthis admiration, which goes beyond the passivity of contemplativeattitudes, the joy of reading appears to be thereflection of the joy of writing, as though the reader werethe writer's ghost. At least the reader participates in thejoy of creation that, for Bergson, is the sign of creation.2Here, creation takes place on the tenuous thread of thesentence, in the fleeting life of an expression. But this poeticexpression, although it has no vital necessity, has a bracingeffect on our lives, for all that. To speak well is part of liv-1 Jean-Paul Richter, Le Titan, French translation by Philarete-Chaslea,1878, Vol. I, p. 22.2 Henri Bergson, L'Energie Spirituelle, p. IS.