ABSTRACT
MOST COGENTLY, Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is a discourse of cul-
tural latency that looks to tracing salient moments of innovation that evidence
a radicalization of imagination and form in poetic writing. Prior to the Poetics,
however, Bachelard had developed as a philosopher of science, concerned
with the manner in which scientifi c thought structures and legitimates its
operations. The Poetics, then, seems to mark a radical departure from such
interest in ‘scientifi city’ in its deployment of a richly associative ‘phenomeno-
logical’ style and in its concern to track the germinal impulse within a variety
of poetic works. Indeed, the Poetics is an attempt to develop a form of dis-
course (phenomenology) that accounts for the instigation of ‘image’ within
creative thought – literally the germinal moment of creative imagining – quite
specifi cally challenging the aptitude of causal, linear modes of thought to
account for, let alone propitiate, such birthing. ‘Image’ is the name given to
those moments of cultural intensity that burst expectation and proliferate
wildly, radicalizing the cultural fi eld.
