Abstract

It has been said that Gaston Bachelard's theory of time leads him to a new reflection on poetry. However, the relationship between those two distinct theories has not yet been explained in detail. In this paper, I will aim to elucidate this relationship. In L'instuition de l'instant Bachelard, influenced by Bergson, mainly argued that poetry makes a chain of instants appear as if it were durée which is opposite to the conception of creativity. But under the influence of Roupnel, he also suggests that poetry gives us to experience what an instant is, and he teaches us that it consists in creativity. Thus in his theory of time, especially in terms of the experience of poetry, there seems to be an ambiguity. In 1939 he wrote his first book on poetics, La psychanalyse du feu, and then L'eau et les réves , in which he claimed a new concept of "material imagination", which is based on the Elements. He thought that the images of material imagination were constant and this constancy was nothing but durée. Further, he considered this constancy as a positive property, holding that it gave images creativity which was solely assigned to instances in his previous writings. Therefore, we find that poetics of Bachelard is surely based on the ambiguous reflections on poetry in the theory of time