This lecture explores the concept of material imagination in poetry, discussing how poets use elements like fire, water, and earth to create vivid imagery. The speaker also touches on the idea of a 'waking sleeper' and the role of radio in accessing the unconscious mind.
Gaston Bachelard — 2 recordings in the archive.
Related reading: L’Eau et les rêves by Gaston Bachelard.
Related reading: La Psychanalyse du feu by Gaston Bachelard.
Related reading: L’Air et les songes by Gaston Bachelard.
Related reading: La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté by Gaston Bachelard.
Related reading: La Terre et les rêveries du repos by Gaston Bachelard.
Poetry and the elements. Poetic imagination is generally regarded as a playful faculty, conscious of its irresponsibility, roaming above things and endlessly exchanging one image for another in a virtuoso display of imagery. It is seen as an insatiable need for expression, a need that must always find new forms and new colours. The poet gives himself over to the life of forms and colours. He quickens the movement of everything that lives and shines. If the images in a poem became motionless, they would be accused of being ideas. And yet there are persistent images, images that gather vast poetic regions around themselves, images whose roots run so deep into the human psyche that we may spend a long time searching for the reasons for such depth. These persistent, profound, universal images belong both to the cosmos and to human nature. Considered from the perspective of these privileged images, poetic imagination reveals a psychological significance beyond calculation. It helps us relive the inscription of language at the very centre of the human being. It makes poetry a poetic ontology. In itself, it is a method of investigating the unconscious as a whole. It takes us back to the origin of languages, to the ever-active youth of language. Lyricism is necessarily an enthusiasm for language. In the glory of its new metaphors, poetry is always, however partially, a creation of language. Once a great poet has spoken, language has been permanently raised to a new level. By examining poetic imagination in action, we should therefore be able both to isolate what the psychoanalyst [name unclear] called universal symbols in his fine book Dreams Explained, and to determine the constant activity, the ceaseless renewal, of the powers of symbolisation that animate all poetry. These universal symbols, which join cosmic images with the dreams most deeply rooted in the human unconscious [source reading uncertain], become clearer when images are classified according to the four elements: water, fire, air and earth. It is no accident that these four elements played so great a part in the earliest cosmogonies, in ancient philosophies of the universe, and in that strange combination of ideas and reverie that was alchemy. One might think that the progress of thought and scientific experience had relegated all the imagery of the four elements to mere illusion and naive metaphor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fire, water, earth and…