SOURCE: Higonnet, Margaret R. “Bachelard and the Romantic Imagination.” Cahiers Roumains d'Etudes Litteraires 1 (1987): 92-109.

[In the following essay, Higonnet notes the contradictions in Bachelard's ideas about imagination and investigates the influence of Romantic theories on his work.]

The coherence of Gaston Bachelard's ideas about imagination, has long eluded students of his work. Because of his shifts in critical approach, a debate has arisen over what system, if any, governs his meditations on poetic imagery.

The problem requires a comparative approach, since Bachelard's work is rooted in the poetics and poetry of English and German Romanticism, a period for which he declared his affinity. The purpose of comparing Bachelard's thought to that of his Romantic predecessors is not, however, to demonstrate his intellectual dependence. Many students of Bachelard have noted in passing his interest in writers like Novalis.¹ Since none explores this interest in detail, it has not been recognized that his thought is closer to Romantic theories than to later aesthetic systems. The key point is that Bachelard turned to Romantic precedents not only for isolated ideas but also for his most characteristic and problematic critical procedures: his reliance on metaphoric associations, disjunctive maxims, and apparently contradictory assertions. These methods are part of his message, which in its dialectical and symbolic character closely resembles Romantic idealism.

Two kinds of contradiction are evident in Bachelard's statements about imagination. First, his values appear to change: the essays on philosophy of science and to some extent Psychanalyse du feu (1938) oset poetic imagery against reason and science whereas L'Eau et les rêves (1942) and later works explore imagery with great sympathy. He strives originally to unmask, then to recover “l'esprit préscientifique” (ER [L'Eau et les rêves], p. 168).² Second, his method shifts from psychoanalysis of images in their genesis (1938—48) to phenomenological evocation of their effects (1957—62).

Critics have responded to these shifts in various ways. Many divide his work into periods, a reflection perhaps of Bachelards' own principle of the rupture; in the words of Jean Starobinski, “Il y a au moins deux styles (ou époques) de la critique chez Gaston Bachelard.”³ Others elaborate an exceedingly complicated theoretical scaffolding whose connections resemble those of a Rube Goldberg cartoon. Some, like Sartre, claim a consistency in method only: “Sa psychanalyse semble plus sûre de sa méthode que de ses principes et sans doute compte-t-elle sur ses résultats pour éclairer sur le but précis de sa recherche. Mais c'est mettre la charrue devant les bœufs.”⁴ More recently, critics have questioned whether Bachelard has either the method attributed to him by Sartre or a system of aesthetic principles.⁵ While there is a consensus that Bachelard adheres to certain general values (such as dynamism, liberation, or idealism), even the clearest expositions of his aesthetic theories tend to view his specific ideas as a grab-bag assortment.⁶

Bachelard himself occasionally lends support to the assumption that his work has no systematic underpinning. In La Poétique de la rêverie (1960), he takes as his motto Jules Laforgue's légende morale, “Méthode, Méthode, que me veux-tu? Tu sais bien que j'ai mangé du fruit de l'inconscient” (p. 1). In both La Poétique de la rêverie and La Poétique de l'espace he calls attention to his own drastic shifts in approach and argues that one must “se déphilosopher” (PE [La Poétique de l'espace], p. 211). The preface to La Flamme d'une chandelle (1961) tells us that Bachelard whishes to write “sans nous emprisonner dans l'unité d'une méthode d'enquête” (p. 1). According to Colette Gaudin, he began one of his lectures by declaring, “I would like to develop a philosophy that would have no point of departure.”⁷ Bachelard's evident resistance to systematic theories reflects in part his quite conventional belief that analytic comprehension of the process of imagination is equivalent to loss of imagination: “La moindre réflexion critique … détruit la primitivité de l'imagination” (PE, p. 10). “Quand on saurait dire comment on imagine, on n'imagine plus” (PE, p. 211).

At the same time, it must be seen that Bachelard recognizes the value of schematization, in spite of its reductive tendency: “Certes, toute schématisation risque de mutiler la réalité, mais elle aide à fixer des perspectives” (PR [La Poétique de la rêverie], p. 18). The manuscript left at his death, La Poétique du phénix, quotes Rimbaud: “Nous t'affirmons, méthode!”⁸ Indeed, he repeatedly voices theoretical ambitions which imply a unified philosophy. At the beginning of the Poétique de l'espace he indicates that he intends to found “une phénoménologie de l'imagination” or even “une métaphysique de l'imagination” (pp. 2-3). This intention can be traced through his earlier works as well. Already in L'Air et les songes (1943), he declares, “La métaphysique de l'imagination … reste partout notre but avoué” (p. 24). In La Terre et les rêveries du repos (1948), he again claims, “Dans cet ouvrage, ainsi que dans tous ceux que nous avons consacrés à l'imagination, nous ne voulons que préparer une doctrine de l'imagination littéraire“(p. 320). And in the companion volume La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté (1948) he describes his books as “essais qui devraient constituer peu à peu les éléments d'une philosophie de l'image littéraire” (p. 9).

Bachelard's thought, then, may be seen as both unsystematic and coherent. He claims that his works progress toward a coherent theory of the imagination despite the obvious fact that the early works propose a psychological system of four materially determined creative mentalities, “une doctrine tétravalente des tempéraments poétiques” (PF [Psychanalyse du feu], p. 148), which the later Poétiques abandon for a phenomenological approach. In what theoretical direction, then, does this sequence of works point?

To locate the source of Bachelard's inspiration and the direction of his thought, some critics have connected him to Henri Bergson, C. G. Jung, and André Breton. The seed of his thought, however, lies further in the past, in the idealist poetics of the imagination which became established during the Romantic period. In this essay I will study the specific theses and strategies of presentation and organization shared by Bachelard and Romantic literary theorists. I do not propose to offer an influence study tracing the course of Bachelard's omnivorous readings but rather to consider the striking number of affinities between his poetics and the theories of the Romantic writers to whom he himself calls our attention.⁹ Unlike much recent work on Bachelard, this essay will focus on theory rather than on interpretative methods. The Poétiques, which appeared long after Sartre's critique, allow us to perceive the boeuf that draws the charrue. I emphasize the Poétiques because they represent in many ways a culmination of Bachelards' earlier work. The themes central to these highly self-conscious and reflexive texts are already implicit in the preceding works, as the examples in this study demonstrate.¹⁰

Since Bachelard draws upon a range of elements in Romantic poetics, it may help to sketch first some key ideas that emerged at the end of the eighteenth century from the writings of Rousseau, Diderot, Young, Herder, and others.¹¹ In this Romantic poetics the most important feature is the focus on the creative imagination. Allied with the genetic concern for imagination is the more cognitive concern for the element of imagery or symbolism in poetry, seen not only as an instrument for expression but as one of the means by which poetry transfigures and translates nature.¹² Concomitant with imagination and imagery, we find such related topics as novelty, liberation from norms or clichés, and primitivism of various kinds. These are the main Romantic themes whose importance for Bachelard constitutes the first part of my argument, leading up to an examination of the ways in which these themes are organized and presented.

The most characteristically Romantic aspect of Bachelard's poetics is the central ontological function assigned to the imagination. He locates the imagination at the center of being as that which defines man, “la faculté hominisante par excellence” (AS [L'Air et les songes], p. 20). It is the source not merely of all artistic creativity but of all vitality. The Poétique de l'espace proposes to consider the imagination as “une puissance majeure de la nature humaine” (p. 16). In the Poétique de la rêverie Bachelard proclaims his goal to be “une phénoménologie de l'imaginaire où l'imagination est mise à sa place, à la première place, comme principe d'excitation directe du devenir psychique” (p. 7). It is this thesis which most clearly unites all Bachelard's essays in poetics and which emerges as the dominant theme of his later works.

The ontological significance of the imagination is a tenet which Bachelard links regularly to Romantic writers like Blake: “Plus quetoute autre puissance, elle spécifie le psychisme humain. Comme le proclame Blake: ‘L'imagination n'est pas un état, c'est l'existence humaine elle-même’ (AS, pp. 7-8). He finds a similar view of imagination in Novalis, for whom poetry is “Gemütserregungskunst,” translated by Bachelard as “l'art du dynamisme psychique” (AS, p. 218), and imagination “das würckende Princip.”¹³ If we follow Novalis, he claims, “alors on s'établit dans une philosophie de l'imagination pour laquelle l'imagination est l'être même, l'être producteur de ses images et de ses pensées” (AS, p. 127).

In these passages Bachelard turns consciously to English and German Romantic models for the ontological view of creative imagination which he repeatedly constrasts to Bergson's philosophy (ironically so, given Bergson's own connections to German Romanticism). One reason may be the emphasis on poetry in the aesthetics of writers like Novalis and Schelling, which apparently provides a more useful precedent for Bachelard's theory of verbal imagination than does Bergson's alingual intuition. Already in Psychanalyse du feu, he distinguishes creative imagination from Bergson's élan vital and from Schopenhauer's “will”: “Plus que la volonté, plus que l'élan vital, l'Imagination est la force même de la production psychique” (p. 215). He thus affirms a return to the Romantic cult of the poetic imagination as first principle.

The ontological conception of imagination as life force finds its epistemological corollary in Bachelard's value-laden distinction between imagination and either perception or memory. La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté, for example, aims to show “comment ce qu'on imagine commande ce qu'on perçoit, pour donner ainsi à l'imagination la place qui lui revient dans l'activité humaine: la place première” (p. 63). The imagination creates, it does not reproduce images of reality: “L'imagination créatrice a de tout autres fonctions que celles de l'imagination reproductrice” (p. 3).

Bachelard appears to contradict himself about the relative priorities of imagination and perception. At the beginning of L'Air et les songes, he describes the imagination as a power that transforms the images of perception: “On veut toujours que l'imagination soit la faculté de former des images. Or elle est plutôt la faculté de déformer les images fournies par la perception, elle est surtout la faculté de nous libérer des images premières, de changer les images” (p. 7). Near the end of the same work, he emphasizes by contrast the creative novelty of the literary image, arguing that it precedes and does not cloak external perception: “Il n'y a pas de réalité antécédente à l'image littéraire” (p. 283). At times he slides from an objective to a subjective definition of reality: “s'ouvrir au Monde objectif, entrer dans le Monde objectif, constituer un Monde que nous tenons pour objectif” (PR, p. 12). Clearly there is a dialectic between the two positions, but Bachelard generally subordinates external to internal reality: “Le fait imaginé est plus important que le fait réel” (ER, p. 238). As an idealist, he playfully undermines the value of réalite when he attributes to the imagination “une fonction de l'irréel” whose utility is superior. As early as 1933 Bachelard could write, “Le monde est ma miniature,”¹⁴ a position which he echoes in La Terre et les rêveries du repos: Quand la Nature imite l'humain, elle imite l‘humain imaginé” (p. 196).

Among the works on the imagination, only in Psychanalyse du feu does Bachelard warn of the dangers of poetry or revery as opposed to reality and promise to cure man of the happy infection of the imagination: “guérir l'esprit de ses bonheurs” (p. 14). His language reveals, however, that his proposal is ironic—“un exercise où nous sommes maître: se moquer de soi-même” (p. 16). In any case, even here he asserts the priority of the imaginative vision, which mathematical reason merely follows and corrects. On the relationship between imagination and perception, then, Bachelard is consistent, even in Psychanalyse du feu.

That Bachelard celebrates “la victoire de l'imagination créatrice sur le réalisme” (ER, p. 255) is too obvious a point to belabor here. What is important for our purposes is that he repeatedly identifies this thesis with his favorite Romantic writers, from Blake and Shelley to Richter and Novalis, and that he chooses to express it in their words. The distinction between imagination and perception or memory is not an exclusively Romantic phenomenon, of course. For Bachelard, however, it is unquestionably a distinction identified with English and German Romanticism.

For each aspect of this idealist epistemology we find a reference to a Romantic precedent. In a key passage of the introduction to La Poétique de l'espace, Bachelard attacks Bergson's treatment of imagination as “la mémoire poétisée” in Matière et mémoire and turns to Jean Paul Richter for a more satisfactorily creative view: “Jean-Paul Richter n'a-t-il pas écrit: ‘L'imagination reproductrice est la prose de l'imagination productrice’” (pp. 16-17).¹⁵ Another Romantic to whom Bachelard links the distinction between imagination and perception is Shelley: “Le monde réel est absorbé par le monde imaginaire. Shelley nous livre un véritable théorème de la phénoménologie quand il dit que l'imagination est capable ‘de nous faire créer ce que nous voyons.’¹⁶ En suivant Shelley, en suivant les poètes, la phénoménologie de la perception elle-même doit céder la place à la phénoménologie de l'imagination créatrice” (PR, p. 12). Perhaps the most extreme formulation of Bachelard's position comes in a passage of L'Air et les songes where he quotes Blake: “Or, on n'imagine pas bien ce que l'on connaît. Blake a justement écrit: ‘Les objets naturels n'ont jamais cessé d'affaiblir, d'abrutir et d'effacer l'imagination en moi.’ … L'irréel commande le réalisme de l'imagination” (p. 106; cf. ER, p. 252). But his favorite spokesman for epistemological idealism is Novalis. He quotes him as saying that nature is “une fixation de l'Imagination,”¹⁷ and that “l'univers est en quelque sorte un précipité de la nature humaine” (AS, p. 126). He also finds in him a source for his pancalisme, his theory that the imagination animates and “valorizes” the materials of perception: “Ainsi, pour l'idéalisme magique de Novalis, c'est l'être humain qui éveille la matière” (TRV [La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté], p. 24). Such statements make clear the importance of idealist Romantic precedents in Bachelard's formulation of his ideas about the place and function of the imagination.

The priority of the imagination over perception or memory reflects Bachelard's reliance on a hierarchy of mental faculties. This assumption is again common among Romantic writers such as Jean Paul and Coleridge, though it is rarely presented with rigorous consistency. Bachelard attributes it to Novalis: “Nous dirons donc avec Novalis: ‘De l'imagination productrice doivent être déduites toutes les facultés, toutes les activités du monde intérieur et du monde extérieur.’ “¹⁸ Not surprisingly, he also refers to Baudelaire's thesis that the imagination is the queen of the faculties: “L'être entier est mobilisé par l'imagination, comme l'a reconnu Baudelaire: ‘Toutes les facultés de l'âme humaine doivent être subordonnées à l'imagination qui les met en réquisition toutes à la fois’” (TRV, p. 51). In drawing thus on the traditional language of faculty psychology to describe poetic creativity, Bachelard sets himself apart from most modern speculation like that of the French phenomenologists.¹⁹

The cult of the imagination is the main currency of Romantic poetics; the obverse of the coin is a cult of the image or symbol. Bachelard, like the Romantics, emphasizes the psychology of the artist in his definition of the work of art, and like them he also connects the theory of the imagination to the theory of the image. Together with Coleridge, Bachelard believes that “What is poetry? is so nearly the same question with, what is a poet? that the answer to the one is involved in the solution of the other” (Biographia Literaria, Ch. xiv). Among the major assumptions he shares with writers like Novalis, Schlegel, Wordsworth and Coleridge is the association of poetry with image or metaphor, with dreams and the sources of conscious life, with various kinds of literary primitivism, with alchemy, and with metamorphosis.

Bachelard gives the image the very highest importance in poetry (a term which for him, as for the Romantics, includes prose). The Poétique de l'espace affirms that the creation and association of images are the main tasks of the poet: “s'il y a métier chez le poète c'est dans la tâche subalterne d'associer des images” (pp. 15—16). This primacy of the image can be traced back through all his earlier works on poetics. In Psychanalyse du feu, for example, we find one of his best-known phrases: “Les métaphores s'appellent et se coordonnent plus que les sensations, au point qu'un esprit poétique est purement et simplement une syntaxe de métaphores” (p. 179). In L'Eau et les rêves he declares, “La métaphore est le phénomène de l'âme poétique” (p. 246). And in a brief “Message” Bachelard describes the symbole as “une force créatrice”: “Le symbole centralise des forces qui sont en l'homme et des forces dispersées dans tous les êtres du monde.”²⁰ While his terms change (image, metaphor, symbol, and archetype acquire different relative significance as his work progresses), the ontological value attached to the image parallels that attributed to the imagination. Poetic images are “des miniatures de l'élan vital” (PE, p. 10).

Hence whether his subject is fire, water, air, earth, space, or revery itself, the focus of Bachelard's literary interpretation is always the image. Indeed, this constitutes one of the major charges brought against his method, namely, that it is concerned with an element of poetry, not with poems as aesthetic wholes. Bachelard himself comments on his pointilliste method, which has met so much opposition. In La Terre et les rêveries du repos he explains, “Pour nous, les ‘cas’ sont de toutes petites images trouvées au coin d'une page” (p. 76), a limitation which he claims enables him to isolate the problem of expression. As he repeats in the late Poétiques, the poetic image is important to him because it lies at the origin of consciousness and of language (PE, pp. 8, 11; PR, pp. 1, 3). In his emphasis on the image, Bachelard resembles the Romantics, but in this neglect of context, he distances himself from the preoccupation of Romantic writers with what they considered to be the organic whole.

Inevitably, since Bachelard locates the image at the origin of consciousness, he is interested in the connections among dream, revery, and imaginative literature, and his interest in dreams leads him to cite several Romantic writers as masters of dream-literature, such as Novalis, Richter, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. For example, referring to Novalis, he argues that the full subjective value of an image can be grasped only by recovering its primitive dream-function: “Mais allez au fond de l'inconscient; retrouvez, avec le poète, le rêve primitif et vous verrez clairement la vérité” (PF, p. 72). It is important to note that he is interested in the dream image or scene, not in sequences, not in the violations of connection which are the subject of Novalis' famous fragment on the Märchen, although Bachelard does postulate a “rupture” as the hallmark of the creatively vital image.

Daydreams and verbal reveries interest Bachelard more than dreams. Already in Psychanalyse du feu, he distinguishes his own imaginative study of conscious daydreams and reveries centered on an object or image from the psychoanalysis of involuntary, nocturnal dreams (p. 32). In general, Bachelard identifies the literary imagination with poetic revery: both are expressed in images and both react to images with profound associations. For Bachelard to dream about images means to give them value by amplifying or concentrating their essential oneiric features, “une analyse des valeurs oniriques.” One should, therefore, “expliquer les rêves par les rêves” (TRR [La Terre et les rêveries du repos], pp. 48-49), a maxim with the same reflexive ring as Friedrich Schlegel's Lyceum fragment 117: “Poesie kann nur durch Poesie kritisiert werden.”²¹La Poétique de l'espace returns to this definition of Bachelard's interpretative goals: “La lecture des poètes est essentiellement rêverie” (p. 34). Such associative responsiveness fosters a return to primitive themes: “La rêverie reprend sans cesse les thèmes primitifs” (PF, p. 13).

The identification of revery with primitive values introduces another feature of Bachelard's theory of images: primitivism. Bachelard's thesis of the expressive primacy of the image is very closely allied to the Vichian linguistic primitivism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, according to which man first expresses himself in figurative language. Bachelard links the idea to Novalis: “Le psychisme humain se formule primitivement en images … cette pensée de Novalis … est une dominante de l'idéalisme magique” (TRV, p. 5). The idea is one which Novalis shares with many others of the Romantics Bachelard read: Shelley, for example, says that the language of the first men is “vitally metaphorical.” Discussing the power of a novel image to renovate language, Bachelard refers to Jacobi, who read Vico at Goethe's suggestion: “Réanimer un langage en créant de nouvelles images, voilà la fonction de la littérature et de la poésie. Jacobi a écrit: ‘Philosopher, ce n'est jamais que découvrir les origines du langage’” (TRV, p. 6).

Bachelard, of course, recognizes the Romantics' interest in primal myths, as well as images and Ursprache. He argues, following Albert Béguin, that “les romantiques, en revenant à des expériences plus ou moins durables de la primitivité,” were able to recover the essential values of images like fire, and he describes the poetry of Novalis as “un effort pour revivre la primitivité. Pour Novalis, le conte est toujours plus ou moins une cosmogonie” (PF, pp. 67-68).

The primitivism implicit in Bachelard's cult of the image is thus one of its most strikingly Romantic features. The image is primary and primal as much as primordial, a conflation of concepts as common to Romantic writers as it is to Bachelard. This cluster of different connotations is woven together constantly by Bachelard: “L'image, dans sa simplicité, n'a pas besoin d'un savoir. Elle est le bien d'une conscience naive. En son expression, elle est jeune langage. Le poète, en la nouveauté de ses images, est toujours origine de langage” (PE, p. 4). At the psychological level, the verbal image as the spontaneous autonomous product of the imagination precedes the verbal expression of other faculties: “Les images sont les réalités psychiques premières. Tout commence, dans l'expérience même, par des images” (TRR, p. 292).

An important ambiguity emerges when the image is seen as primary, for it is both novel and eternal, both youthfully fresh and ancestrally primordial. From L'Eau et les rêves to La Poétique de la rêverie, Bachelard repeats that the two somehow go together, “l'image nouvelle greffée sur une image ancienne” (ER, p. 24), the new verbal act reviving and reverberating against the fundamental archetype. “Cette exigence, pour une image poétique, d'être une origine psychique, aurait cependant une dureté excessive si nous ne pouvions trouver une vertu d'originalité aux variations mêmes qui jouent sur les archétypes les plus fortement enracinés” (PR, p. 2). As important as Jung inevitably is for Bachelard's theories of archetypes and imaginative alchemy, he does not find it necessary to accept Jung's postulate of a collective unconscious which would explain the image causally. Unlike the analyst, who wishes to explain the poetic flower by the fertilizer, Bachelard asserts, “Une image poétique, rien ne la prépare, surtout pas la culture, dans le mode littéraire, surtout pas la perception, dans le mode psychologique” (PE, p. 8). Bachelard therefore has more sympathy with a Romantic emphasis on the novelty, the metamorphic and liberating powers of the image, than with a modern theory of eternal archetypes. It may be worth noting that it is not just the later works like La Poétique de l'espace which assert: “L'acte poétique n'a pas de passé” (p. 1). Earlier works like L'Air et les songes also stress the idea that “il n'y a pas de poésie antécédente à l'acte du verbe poétique” (p. 283). Each archetypal image “doit avoir sa différentielle de nouveauté” (TRV, p. 6), as a token of its creative power. An affective version of primitivism can be uncovered in what Bachelard says about the impact of this novelty on the reader. In part, the implication is Rousseauistic. Bachelard wishes to liberate man from the burden of tradition, “à écarter tous les entraînements de la culture”, and to recover the wonder of childhood, “retrouver notre naïf émerveillement” (PE, pp. 211, 95). The imagination cleanses the doors of perception, as Blake would put it; it restores “the sparkle and the dew drops” which have dried up with custom, according to Coleridge; Novalis' term is dephlegmatisiren. Perhaps even closer to Bachelard's attitude is Shelley's description of poetry: “It purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being. It compels us to feel that which we perceive, and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the universe after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.”²² Bachelard likewise believes that images help us to see afresh: “Créer une image, c'est vraiment donner à voir. Ce qui était mal vu, ce qui était perdu dans la paresseuse familiarité, est désormais objet nouveau pour un regard nouveau” (AS, p. 34). And of the imagination he says, “Elle ouvre des yeux qui ont des types nouveaux de vision” (ER, p. 24). One cannot but be struck by the similarity here to Romantic notions of art as visionary rather than mimetic.

There are, of course, many ways to renovate language and images, to achieve the novelty so important to Bachelard. Some of the ways he stresses are the selection of vivid detail, the creation of ambiguity, the discovery of correspondences or “alchemical” connections, and deformation or metamorphoses of the images provided by external reality or by the past.

Bachelard's emphasis on the vital detail perfectly epitomizes the particularizing tendency of his analysis. It plays an especially important role in La Poétique de l'espace, where he says: “Des idées générales … bloquent alors l'imagination. On a vu, on a compris, on a dit. Tout est clos. Il faut alors rencontrer une image particulière pour redonnor vie à l'image générale … Avec un détail poétique, l'imagination nous place devant un monde neuf” (pp. 119, 129). Blake may provide a point of comparison, although a similar anti-neclassica position could be found in the writings of Jean Paul, Friedrich Schlegel, and others. Blake's aphorism says that to generalize is to be an idiot; for Richter, sensuousness (Anschaulichkeit) is the life of style. Similarly, sensuous or material values are for Bachelard a source of energy and of dynamic correspondences: “Seules, les valeurs sensuelles donnent ‘des correspondences’” (ER, p. 31).

Bachelard is indeed remarkably interested in the very Romantic ideas of correspondences, analogies, homologies, in “le secret des correspondences qui nous invitent à la vie multiple, à la vie métaphorique” (TRR, pp. 81-82). Traditionally a distinction can be drawn between thinkers who are concerned with transcendental correspondences between this world and a higher world and those who are concerned with immanent correspondences between language and this world, or between states of mind and the things of this world. Strictly speaking, Bachelard falls in the latter, secular category. The linguistic orientation of Bachelard's interest in correspondences can be summed up in his own words: “Tous les grands mots, tous les mots appelés à la grandeur par un poète sont des clefs d'univers, du double univers, du Cosmos et des profondeurs de l'âme humaine” (PE, p. 181). Although Bachelard can and does find correspondences in Balzac and Baudelaire, he also associates the theme with alchemy, as discussed by Novalis and by Jung.

Alchemy, in turn, provides a framework for Bachelard's discussion of the imaginative transformations and metamorphoses effected in images. While Jung's discussion of alchemy is of great importance to Bachelard both as a source and as intellectual framework, he also refers extensively to the writings of Novalis, whom he describes as a “grand psychologue de l'alchimie.” The alchemist is important to Bachelard because he works transformations, thus symbolizing the poet, and because he “valorizes” elements, recovering the primal energy of images through participation or projection. Accordingly Bachelard attributes to Jacob Boehme and to Blake, because of their alchemical interests, a dynamic imagination which creates animate images: “On verra de nombreux exemples de cette participation essentiellement dynamique dans les œuvres de Jacob Bœhme et de William Blake” (AS, p. 257).

The theme of metamorphic image-making takes on a Protean range of forms besides alchemy in Bachelard's various works. According to the essay on Lautréamont, “la métamorphose devientainsi la fonction spécifique de l'imagination” (L [Lautréamont], p. 195). In L'Eau et les rêves he speaks of images “qui dépassent la réaité, qui chantent la réalité” (p. 23), a characteristically Romantic association of poetry with music. Exaggeration is yet another example of the metamorphic function. In La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté, he calls “le signe du trop, le sceau même de l'imaginaire” (p. 26). The very concentration of the image implies overflow: each image can be designated as “un excès du l'imagination” (PE, p. 111). The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, as Blake would put it. Bachelard suggests here not only a loosely “romantic rebellion” against neoclassic constraints but a modern and technical theory of linguistic excess.

Dreams, alchemy, and metamorphosis are all idealist tremes related to the imaginative “valorization” that Bachelard finds in Novalis' pancalisme or in Jean Paul's idyllic descriptions of internalized space. In the early works, Bachelard stresses the value and energy that archetypal images can achieve through renovation and transformation. In the later works, he turns from such archetypal terminology to a more phenomenological stress on the happiness he believes can be achieved through participation in the concentration and cosmic expansiveness of key images. Both early and late, Bachelard connects the dynamic character of the image to its beneficial power for the reader and cites Romantic examples of valorization to which he attributes such power. One of his most profound assumptions is this fusion of pathetic and affective fallacies.

Yet another theme which belongs in the potpourri of Romantic thought, one which bears perhaps a more Rousseauistic cast, is that of solitary revery. The melancholy mood of French Romanticism, however, with its ennui and spleen, is essentially alien to Bachelard, whose aesthetics of joy has other affinities: Richter's idylls serve him frequently as models. English Romantic poetry such as Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode” also has a suggestive similarity to Bachelard's view of joy as sign and subject of the shaping spirit:

Joy, Lady! is the spirit and the power
Which wedding Nature to us, gives in dower
A new Earth and new Heaven.

(lines 67-69)

Within the tradition of French aesthetics, Bergson's creative joy would be the closest analogy.

Each of these individual ideas links Bachelard to Romantic thought. More important, the ways in which these ideas come together in Romantic thought help us to understand how they can coexist in Bachelard's work. The second part of my argument, then, is that we can recognize the coherence of Bachelard's thought once we identify the argumentative structures he also drew from Romantic poetics.

As René Wellek has noted, most Romantic literary theories operate within a dialectical framework, opposing imagination and reason, poetry and science, or self and reality. At times, the result appears contradictory: the poet strives, for example, to achieve both originality and the eternal values of myth and primitive expression. Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel rely heavily on the speculative devices of ironic juxtaposition and paradox; Schlegel gives the name “parabolic form” to this philosophic procedure. Romantic poetics are also organized on the principle of the associative clustering of ideas, linked often by puns and metaphors. Yet another heuristic strategy of Schlegel, Novalis, and Blake is the fragmentary or aphoristic formulation of ideas, striving for a combination of formal closure and intellectual open-endedness. These various rhetorical devices are used by the Romantics both to engage the imagination of the reader and to express the qualities of originality, dynamism, and synthesis they attribute to the imagination.

Bachelard takes over these patterns of aphoristic formulation, metaphoric association, and dialectical opposition from the Romantics, along with their basic tenets about imagination and poetry. A failure to recognize the expressive function that unites these seemingly discontinuous patterns is partly responsible for the controversy over the unity of his thought.

Bachelard habitually elaborates his theses not through logic but through analogy, allusion, and witty aphorism. As a result, his ideas appear to scatter rather than proceed toward a single goal. Typical aphorisms would be his Kantian defense of “l'utilité de l'inutile” or the Schlegelian recommendation, “expliquer les rêves par les rêves.” His love of paradox joins with his penchant for associative thinking to explain the contradictory usage of the term “primitif” to mean both the novel and the eternal. The connection between these devices and Romantic poetics is one Bachelard understood. In La Flamme d'une chandelle, for example, he confesses that he is drawn to Romantic writers like Novalis by their use of fragments: “Nous avons bien souvent été attiré par des pensées en fragments, par des pensées qui ne prouvent pas, mais qui, en des affirmations rapides, donnent à la rêverie des impulsions sans pareille” (p. 14). The rhetoric thus supports his identification of poetry—and poetics—with imagination and revery.

His theoretical focus on imagery leads Bachelard to use imagery rather than expository prose, a method which constitutes one of the beauties and difficulties of his work. The images he selects frequently remind us of those figures of speech characteristic of Romantic poetics. The most common may be the images of inner light, inner vision, and inner form (ER, p. 1) which echo the Romantic substitution of the lamp for the mirror as emblem of creativity, some of which I have already quoted. Bachelard speaks in La Poétique de l'espace of “une lumière intérieurre, celle qu'une ‘vision intérieure’ connait” (p. 5). The lamp is implicit in his description of active vision: “Pour la vision active, il semble que l'oeil projette de la lumière” (ER, p. 41).

In addition to these persistent images of light we find the Aeolian harp, “cette petite harpe éolienne, délicate entre toutes, placée par la nature à la porte de notre souffle” (PE, p. 180). Bachelard also associates the breeze, like a Romantic, with inspiration, and the image with a seed or plant, “une image-germe, un germe-image” (FC [La Flamme d'une chandelle], p. 74). Organic figures recur to explain the creative process: “L'image est une plante qui a besoin de terre et de ciel, de substance et de forme” (ER, p. 4; cf. PR, p. 1, ER, pp. 14-15, 22, PF, p. 163). In short, Bachelard seems so imbued with Romantic thought about the imagination and imagery that he returns constantly to the figures most closely identified with that thought.

Above all, the pattern which emerges to unify these features of Bachelard's writing is dialectical. He defines poetry in terms of a series of oppositions, for the most part derived from the polarities of imagination and reason or imagination and perception. Imagination operates at two levels, an ambiguity that lies at the heart of the confusion about Bachelard's thought. At the lower level, imagination is opposed to reason, as thesis to antithesis. At the higher level, imagination is the power of synthesis.

Logically, the queen of faculties rules and integrates the other faculties: “L'imagination met en effet une pointe à tous nos sens” (PE, p. 89). “Tous les sens s'éveillent et s'harmonisent dans la rêverie poétique” (PR, p. 6). In the terminology of his early works on the material imagination, “dans l'aperception imaginaire totale (forme et matière), la synthèse est première” (TRR, p. 26). That the imagination should represent the highest, synthesizing power will come as no surprise to students of Romanticism. Bachelard himself refers to the late German Romantic K. W. F. Solger to support his argument that in its proper role the imagination reintegrates the powers of thought and feeling: “Il sufit de rendre son rôle premier à l'imagination, au seuil de la parole et de la pensée … Ainsiest réintégré le sentir dans le penser, comme le voulait Solger” (TRR, pp. 66-67). Bachelard's belief in “l'action synthétique de l'imagination” (TRR, p. 233) could also be compared to Coleridge's “magical and synthesizing power.” Shelley's “principle of synthesis,” or Richter's harmonizing and totalizing Phantasie.

While the synthesizing imagination is ultimately supreme, at a lower level imagination is paired with reason or perception as opposite but equal; the value of reason and reality relative to imagination therefore depends upon the context. A point often overlooked is that, for Bachelard, poetry requires the collaboration of both imagination and reason, of l'âme et l'esprit, or anima and animus. The poetic image arises through a simple movement of l'âme, but to complete and structure a poem requires l'esprit: “Il faut l'union d'une activité rêveuse et d'une activité idéative pour produire une œuvre poétique. L'art est de la nature greffée” (ER, p. 15). This basic antinomy takes many forms in his work: besides the pairs already cited, we find l'image and le concept, unconscious and conscious imagination, material and formal imagination. In La Poétique de l'espace he indicates a preference for the German terms der Geist and die Seele as more clearly distinct than the French equivalents (p. 4).

The way Bachelard sets up these oppositions echoes the pattern of Romantic poetics. For Bachelard, imagination is at once voluntary and involuntary: “L'image littéraire, si spontanée qu'elle prétende être, est tout de même une image réfléchie, une image surveillée” (TRR, p. 320). This balance is essential to his distinction between active revery and passive dream: “L'imagination dynamique est … la volonté qui réve” (AS, p. 110). Very similar pairings occur in the theories of Bachelard's favorite writers. Richter in the Vorschule attributes both Besonnenheit and Instinkt to genius; A. W. Schlegel argues that Shakespeare was both conscious and inspired; and Coleridge in Biographia Literaria stresses the poetic” balance or reconciliation” of idea with image, judgment with enthusiasm, and thought with feeling. These are not isolated examples of dialectic in Romantic aesthetic psychology. Furthermore, Bachelard's self-conscious references to the division in his work between poetics of revery and philosophy of science may be compared to the Romantic contrast between poetry and science (rather than history).

The form of dialectic that Bachelard derives most explicitly from Romantic thought is that of subject and object. His early version, the distinction between the material and formal imaginations, should perhaps be traced to Schiller's Stofftrieb and Formtrieb.²³ Yet he is more prone to link the dialectic of subject and object or of man and nature, implicit in the notion of formal and material drives, to somewhat later writers. He praises Coleridge for recognizing the union of sentiment and sight in “l'Einfühlung aérienne” (AS, p. 191), and he cites at length Book IV of Wordsworth's Prelude for the interplay of reality and reflection (ER, p. 73). La Poétique de la rêverie finds the dialectic of external and internal worlds in Richter: “Jean-Paul pousse jusqu'à l'absolu la dialectique du monde contemplé et du monde recréé par la rêverie” (p. 172). Novalis, however, is the name with which he most often associates this “union pancaliste du visible et de la vision” (ER, p. 42). Novalis' theory of magical idealism as expounded in the Athenaeum fragments explains for him the interaction of subject and object: “L'image a une double réalité: une réalité psychique et une réalité physique. C'est par l'image que l'être imaginant et l'être imaginé sont au plus proche” (TRV, p. 5; cf. p. 24).

Some of the ideas Bachelard shares with his Romantic predecessors can, of course, also be attributed to Bergson or to phenomenological predecessors such as Husserl and Heidegger: for example, the cult of creativity, the emphasis on the moment of aesthetic experience as “une prise de conscience,” and the intensity of the feeling-experience. Although Bachelard neglects key features of Husserlian aesthetics such as intentionality and self-consciousness, his empathetic approach is in many ways characteristic of French phenomenology: images are lived, reimagined, renovated through conscious revery. The reader “tente de répéter pour lui la création, de continuer, s'il se peut, l'exagération” (PE, pp. 203-04). The dialectical movement (retentissement) between reader and poet is the tenet which brings him closest to the phenomenological approach.

Perhaps because of some anxiety of influence, however, Bachelard carefully distinguishes himself from these models. He prefers Jean Paul's description of the imagination to Bergson's, as we have seen. Not Sartre but a character in Jean Paul's Titan provides an example of “l'adhésion phénoménologique totale” or sympathetic creativity (PE, p. 9). He turns not to Heidegger but to Novalis for a discussion of ecsistence, “l'art de sauter au-delà de soi-même” (FC, p. 66), and for a description of man as the meaning-giver.

Furthermore, comparison of Bachelard's thought with that of the Romantics helps illuminate the presence in his work of elements not generally associated with phenomenology. As already noted, his reliance upon the terminology of faculty psychology, characteristic of Romantic theorists, would be quite unusual in strict phenomenology. Another element of Bachelard's thought which falls into place once one approaches him from a Romantic perspective is his insistence on poetic autonomy, which follows from his assumptions about the priority of the imagination (TRV, p. 8; TRR, pp. 77, 184; PE, p. 144). His distinction between vital, polysemous images and dead, monovalent metaphors (where Bergson again lands ironically on the wrong side of the fence) parallels the old distinction between symbol and allegory (PE, pp. 79-80; FC, p. 2).²⁴ Finally, Bachelard's combination of idealism and an emphasis on the material sources of imaginative power may be compared profitably to the affirmation in Romantic poetics of both the metamorphic imagination and the return to nature. As Paul de Man has shown, this conjunction creates a problematic tension in Romantic thought.²⁵ Bachelard appears deliberately to exploit this tension, refusing either to expound a synthesis or to analyze ironic distances and discontinuities. His rhetoric is, as it were, a rhetoric of atemporality.

Of all the Romantics the most important for him is Novalis, whose work has served him as a kind of Bible: “Nous avons lu et relu l'œuvre d'un Novalis. Nous en avons reçu de grandes leçons” (FC, p. 14). If we apply Bachelard's categories of analysis to his own work, we find that his critical method from Psychanalyse du feu onward exemplifies what he calls the Novalis complex, “ce besoin de pénétrer, d'aller à l'intérieur des choses, à l'intérieur des êtres” (PF, p. 68). There are many verbal echoes of Novalis; the title La Flamme d'une chandelle, for example, comes from one of Novalis' fragments (FC, p. 63). Bachelard's main themes are consistently identified with Novalis, especially the belief in a dynamic imagination that transfigures the natural world, “la thèse de Novalis d'un pancalisme actif” (PR, p. 159; cf. p. 157). Given his emphasis on the material imagination, it is perhaps somewhat surprising that Bachelard should show so much interest in the idealism of Novalis. Yet recognition of this affinity is essential to any understanding of Bachelard's work as a whole. We must remember that Bachelard's materialism operates dialectically within an idealist context: “Dans le règne de l'imagination, à toute immanence s'adjoint une transcendance” (AS, p. 12). Bachelard wishes to provide in a modest way the transcendental theory of the imagination that Novalis hoped from Fichte, “une'Fantastique transcendantale’” (TRV, p. 5). The highest philosophic accomplishment for him is transcendental irony: “L'art de sauter au-delà de soi-même est partout l'acte le plus haut … Ainsi la philosophie commence là où le philosophant se philosophise lui-même” (FC, p. 66). It is an idea he takes from Novalis (PR, p. 146), one whose reflexiveness proves him even more closely related to German Romanticism—to Novalis, Schlegel, and Solger—than to English or French Romanticism.

If we recognize the affinities of Bachelard to the Romantic past, we can better locate him in the topography of modern poetics. As Gillo Dorfles has shown, Vichian theories of myth, metaphor, and primitive (“heroic”) language have played a considerable role in twentieth-century theories, from Ernst Cassirer and Susanne Langer to Herbert Read and Owen Barfield.²⁶ Phenomenology offers the best parallel to Bachelard's retentissement between author and reader, his affective orientation, but his focus on the image finds a closer parallel in American New Criticism. Set into the context of New Criticism, his love for the verbal detail, for paradox, and for ambivalent or multivalent structures comes to the fore.

It could well be argued that Bachelard's alignment is comparative, since his literary perspective is never confined by national borders. The cultural context within which his mind operates differs sharply from the traditional context of seventeenth-century French literature which dominates in the critics associated with the École Normale Supérieure, ranging over European literature from Romanticism to Surrealism. Certain names recur—Novalis, Shelley, and among later writers Nietzsche, Rilke, Valéry, Breton, Bosco—and these reveal special affinities that help us to understand his thought.

Beneath Bachelard's wide-ranging, apparently eclectic sampling of European and American literature lies a consistently Romantic poetics for which Novalis provides the main model. The coherence of Bachelard's theory goes beyond the central idealist theses about the nature of imagery and of the imagination. Comparison to Romantic poetics brings to light the interconnections among secondary themes such as primitivism or literary autonomy, and, most important, it reveals the dialectic structure of Bachelard's thought. For Bachelard finds this structure to be one which enables him to affirm paradoxes and to read expansively, in a literary quest that resembles the Romantic “Sehnsucht nach dem Unendlichen.”

Notes

1. Jean Hippolyte, C. G. Christofides, Colette Gaudin, and Dominique Lecourt all mention such a kinship, especially to the “Fantastique transcendentale” of Novalis which Bachelard takes as a point of reference for his own work in La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté. See Hippolyte, “Gaston Bachelard ou le romantisme de l'intelligence,” in Hommage à Gaston Bachelard by Georges Bouligant et al. (Paris, 1957), p. 14; Christofides, “Bachelard's Aesthetics,” JAAC, 20 (1962), 269; Gaudin, “L'Imagination et la rêverie: remarques sur la poétique de Gaston Bachelard,” Symposium, 20 (1966), 207, 213; Lecourt, Bachelard, ou le jour et la nuit: un essai du matérialisme dialectique (Paris, 1974), p. 142.

   ´François Pire at several points argues that Bachelard's idealist conception of a metamoprhic imagination should be compared to the views of Novalis and Fichte, but does not do so himself in De l'imagination poétique dans l'œuvre de Gaston Bachelard (Paris, 1967), pp. 111, 125, 127, 132-34. Martin Huberman notes connections to Romantic primitivism and metapsychology in his unpublished critique, “Gaston Bachelard and the Literary Imagination in France: The Elemental and the Oneiric,” Diss. Harvard University 1969, pp. 68, 96.

2. All references to Bachelard's works will be included in the text. The texts referred to are:

   PF = Psychanalyse du feu (1938; rpt. Paris, 1965).

   L = Lautréamont (1940; rpt. Paris, 1951).

   ER = L'Eau et les rêves: essai sur l'imagination de la matière (Paris, 1942).

   AS = L'Air et les songes: essai sur l'imagination du mouvement (Paris, 1943)

   TRV = La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris, 1948).

   TRR = La Terre et les rêveries du repos (Paris, 1948).

   PE = La Poétique de l'espace (1957; rpt. Paris, 1974).

   PR = La Poétique de la réverie (1960; rpt. Paris, 1965).

   FC = La Flamme d'une chandelle (1961; rpt. Paris, 1975).

3. “La Stylistique et ses méthodes: Leo Spitzer,” Critique, 20 (1964), 581-82.

4. L'Être et le néant: essai d'ontologie phénoménologique (1943; rpt. Paris, 1949), p. 693.

5. François Pire concludes, “Bachelard ne nous propose aucun système qu'on pourait qualifier d'un mot; il nous propose tout au plus une méthode” (De l'imagination poétique, p. 194). Mary Ann Caws, however, says that Bachelard never even found a method of existential psychology (Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: A Study of Breton and Bachelard, The Hague, 1966, p. 17). Manuel de Diéguez, one of Bachelard's most penetrating critics, points out the logical weakness of Bachelard's epistemological and ontological arguments in L'Écrivain et son langage (Paris, 1960, pp. 221, 228, 230). Diéguez' critique will not be addressed here, since the question of the logic of Bachelard's poetics is separate from that of the associative coherence of his ideas. Instead this paper addresses the distortion represented by interpretations like that of Colette Gaudin, who insists, in her otherwise excellent introduction to On Poetic Imagination, that “there is no attempt at a unifying theory of imagination in Bachelard's works on literary creation” (Gaston Bachelard, On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, Indianapolis, 1971, p. xiii).

6. Thus François Dagognet argues for “une double dynamologic” in Gaston Bachelard, sa vie, son œuvre, avec un exposé de sa philosophie (Paris, 1965), p. 40. François Pire also says that all Bachelard's thought is subordinated to the postulate of dynamism (p. 9), and Marcel Schaettel stresses dynamism in Gaston Bachelard et la lecture de l'oeuvre d'art, Diss. Dijon 1972. Transcendent human freedom is the unifying value for Julien Naud in Structure et sens du symbole: l'imaginaire chez Gaston Bachelard (Tournai, 1971), p. 197; this value is most important also for Edward Kaplan, “Gaston Bachelard's Philosophy of Imagination: An Introduction,” PPR, 33, No. 2 (1972), 1-24.

7. On Poetic Imagination and Reverie, p. xii.

8. Quoted by Jean Lescure, “Introduction à la poétique de Bachelard,” in L'Intuition de l'instant (Paris, 1966), p. 125.

9. One cautionary note should be sounded. Although Bachelard not infrequently cites German and English Romantic writers like the Schlegels and Shelley, his actual quotations often come in translation, through secondary sources like Albert Béguin's L'Ame romantique et le rêve, Paul de Reul's De Wordsworth à Keats, or Ricarda Huch's Les Romantiques allemands, which he read in French. As Claude Pichois points out in his study of Jean Paul's impact in France, Bachelard sometimes uses unrealiable French versions (L'Image de Jean-Paul Richter dans les lettres francaises, Paris, 1963, pp. 343, 440). Passages or phrases important to Bachelard may be of minor importance in the original text. In general, however, these deformations and mediations are of little significance here, since it is ultimately a systematic parallel to the broad tradition of Romantic poetics with which I am concerned, rather than a study of influences.

10. Christofides has described La Poétique de l'espace as the “triumphal apogee” of Bachelard's work on the imaginary (“Bachelard's Aesthetics,” p. 263). Gilbert Durand believes it is La Poétique de la rêverie “où s'éphiphanisentses conceptions philosophiques les plus profondes,” according to “Science objective et conscience symbolique,” CIS, No. 4 (1964), 50. Jean-Claude Pariente finds in the Poétiques “une doctrine cohérente et lucide de l'imaginaire” (“Présence des images,” Critique [Paris], 200, 1964, p. 9). And Jacques Plesson praises “le Bachelard le plus Bachelard, celui des dernières années, l'auteur des deux traités de poétique, que j'estime plus essentiel que celui des quatres éléments” (“Bachelard et le langage,” in Bachelard: Colloque de Cérissy, Paris, 1974, p. 207).

11. If pursued in detail, of course, the specific literary theories of European writers during the Romantic period diverge in many different directios. In its main outlines, my definition of Romantic theory draws upon the work of historians such as H. A. Korff, René Wellek, M.H. Abrams and Armand Nivelle. It includes borderline writers - Jean Paul and Blake as well as Novalis and Wordsworth, for example. See Korff, “Frühromantik,” in Geist der Goethezeit, III (1940; rpt. Leipzig 1966), 265-89; Wellek, “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History,” CL, 1 (1949), 1-23, 147-72, and A History of Modern Criticism, II (New Haven, Conn., 1955); Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953; rpt. New York, 1958); and Nivelle, Frühromantische Dichtungstheorie (Berlin, 1970).

12. Paul de Man, “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image,” in Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York, 1970), pp. 65-66.

13. Novalis Schriften: Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1975), 298 (IX 327).

14. “Le Monde comme caprice et miniature,” in Études, ed. George Canguilhem (Paris, 1970), p. 25.

15. It is worth noting that a few lines later in the Vorschule, Jean Paul goes on to affirm the ontological primacy of the creative imagination in terms much like those of Bachelard: “Aber etwas Höheres ist die Phantasie oder Bildungkraft, sie ist die Welt-Seele der Seele und der Elementargeist der übrigen Kräfte” (Johann Paul Friedrich Richter, Jean Pauls Sämtliche Werke, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Eduard Berend, Weimar, 1935, Section I, XI, 37).

16. While no passage in “A Defence of Poetry” directly corresponds to this quotation, two are closely allied: “All things exist as they are perceived” and “[Poetry] compels us to feel that which we perceive and to imagine that which we know. It creates anew the unierse.”

17. Quoted in Lecourt, p. 143n.

18. TRV, pp. 4-5.

19. I disagree here with Neal Oxenhandler, “Ontological Criticism in America and France,” MLR, 55 (1960), 21.

20. “Message,” CIS, No. 1 (1963), 5.

21. Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner (Paderborn, 1967), II, 168.

22. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,” in Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York, 1977), pp. 505-06.

23. Over the years Bachelard shifts from an emphasis on the material sources of the poetic image, related to what is primitive and eternal in reality, to an emphasis on the transformation worked by imagination, on the creative novelty of “formal” imagination; like Schiller, however, Bachelard is ultimately concerned with a synthesis of the two-drives. True genius, he argues, must unite “les leçons de la forme et les leçons de la matière” (ER, p. 148).

24. Tzvetan Todorov has traced the history of this topos in the chapter “La Crise romantique” of his Thécries du symbole (Paris, 1977).

25. “Intentional Structure,” pp. 65-66. Cf. also his discussion of the dialectical relationship between subject and object as a “mystification” in “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, 1969), p. 191.

26. “Myth and Metaphor in Vico and in Contemporary Aesthetics,” in Giambattista Vico: An International Symposium, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White (Baltimore, 1969), pp. 577-90. There are striking similarities between the careers of Cassirer and Bachelard, both of whom shifted from philosophy of science to works on myth and symbolic poetic language. Huberman suggests Bachelard may have known Cassirer's thought through Charles Baudouin (p. 102).