ON POETIC IMAGINATION AND REVERIE: SELECTIONS FROM THE WORKS OF GASTON BACHELARD.

Translated, with an Introduction, byColette Gaudin (Associate Professor ofRomance Languages). Indianapolis andNew York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company,Inc., 1971. 111 pp. $6.00, Hardback.$2.95, Paperback.

One of the great gloomy discoveries of our life is that we are what we are so arbitrarily; gradually or suddenly we realize that we have been handed a bundle of physical, psychological, and cultural characteristics and have been told: "Here. Be this." Most of us react to this realization by assuming that our bundles are perfect wholes, but some spend the rest of life sifting through themselves, trying to weed out the essential from the accidental, the necessary from the arbitrary. It is to them that the self-conscious disciplines—psychology, philosophy, sociology, aesthetics—offer the greatest interest. If much in these studies is simply the erection of personal whim into monumental dogma, some of it earnestly attempts to get beyond the individual to the central man, the essential self we have it in us to become, and to show how in our experience of life and art we feel the intense existence of that central self.

That self can be found, or at least approached, from many directions. Recently linguists have explained that a child can speak sentences he has never heard because he intuits structures or rules of language behind what he has heard. Some of these rules, they argue, must be universal—that is, they must depend on basic characteristics of the human mind. Aesthetician and philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) sough equivalent universal sets of mind in the world of poetic images and in our imaginative relationship to the primal elements earth, air, fire, and water, which themselves exist in myriad forms with dialectically varying values. Bachelard approached this complex subject from past careers as mailman, a mathematician, a teacher of chemistry and physics, and a professor of the philosophy of science. Obviously the resulting theories and terminologies constitute an almost irreducible totality; in squeezing significant passages from this totality into the narrow confines of a small introductory paperback, Professor Colette Gaudin necessarily appears in the position of a hostess who sets out, in a handsome container, nine salted peanuts. The handsome container is her long, compressed, and handsomely written introduction. And if your appetite is whetted by this intelligently selected and annotated sample, the rest of the peanuts—over twenty volumes of them—are in the library.

Critic and poet, Professor O'Hara teachesEnglish at the College of Liberal Arts andSciences, The University of Connecticut.