a book
The Poetics of Space
Gaston Bachelard · 1964 · 241 pages
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
recommended by 2 people
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Mike White
“This is theory – and French, no less – at its best. It is not ‘deconstructing’ poetry – it IS poetry. Its radical but obvious thesis is that poetry is generative, enhancing our lives with feelings and thoughts that otherwise would not exist. It is alive to the haunting magic of childhood and the imaginative spaces of our youth.”↗
Billy Collins
“In this classic work of French phenomenology, Bachelard examines the symbolic and emotional meanings of such spaces as attics, drawers, closets, and nests. The book moves us easily back and forth from deep theory to everyday experience. The hiding places of childhood are seen as incubators for the imagination, and you might never look at an elevator the same way again.”↗