The poetics of reverie: childhood, language, and the cosmos

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"