Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.
Gaston BachelardRead
One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Reading poetry requires full attention and immersion in the experience.
This quote by Gaston Bachelard emphasizes the necessity of being fully present and engaged when reading poetry. It suggests that true appreciation of poetry cannot occur if one's mind is distracted by other thoughts, highlighting the importance of focus and the immersive nature of poetic experiences.
Themes
PoetryAttentionImmersionFocusExperience
In practice
Example use cases
In a literature class, a teacher can use this quote to stress the importance of being present while analyzing poems.
More from Gaston Bachelard
All quotes βOf course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.
Gaston BachelardRead
Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.
Gaston BachelardRead
Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.
Gaston BachelardRead
In order to dream so far, is it enough to read? Isn't it necessary to write? Write as in our schoolboy past, in those days when, as Bonnoure says, the letters wrote themselves one by one, either in their gibbosity or else in their pretentious elegance? In those days, spelling was a drama, our drama of culture at work in the interior of a word.
Gaston BachelardRead
How is it possible not to feel that there is communication between our solitude as a dreamer and the solitudes of childhood? And it is no accident that, in a tranquil reverie, we often follow the slope which returns us to our childhood solitudes.
Gaston BachelardRead
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