The Poetics of Reverie
1960 book by Gaston Bachelard
The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (French: La poétique de la rêverie) is a 1960 book by the French writer Gaston Bachelard. It is about the relationship between the imagination of the consciousness and the world, approached from a phenomenological viewpoint. Bachelard highlights the dynamic nature of the reverie and draws from philosophy and natural science to meditate on imagination's influences from language, the subject, sexuality, childhood and the environment. He argues that the interconnection between memory, imagination and poetry is at the centre of all good writing and reading.
The Poetics of Reverie was one of Bachelard's last works and thematically followed The Poetics of Space, which is about the relationship between space and poetic imagery. Presses Universitaires de France published the original French edition. It was published in English translation through Beacon Press in 1969.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 30, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q51391753. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1960 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Poetics of Reverie” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.