Bachelard’s Poetic Imagination Of Childhood

Gaston Bachelard marvels at the daydream of childhood,combines childhood with his poetic imagination,and endows childhood with rich poetic connotation.This paper focuses on the childhood image in Bachelard’s poetic works.The image of childhood is a part of Bachelard’s poetic imagination.Bachelard combines childhood with poetry and imagination,finds childhood from poetry and recalls childhood from smell,which provides a method for poetry criticism.Studying Bachelard’s exposition of childhood,poetry and imagination from childhood images can deeply understand his poetic thoughts and the continuity of his poetic thoughts in the early and late periods.Bachelard writes about his childhood,hoping to find it back from his poems,with the purpose of re-experience and developing the driving force of creative imagination.In addition,the exclamation consciousness contained in the childhood image provides inspiration for Bachelard to explore the way of human existence in the real society.He wants to improve the real person from his childhood wealth.This article will discuss the childhood image in Bachelard’s poetic imagination from four aspects:the generation of childhood image,the poetic connotation of childhood,the relationship between childhood and its poetic imagination,and the value of childhood.The first chapter mainly expounds how Bachelard’s childhood view came into being when he took the childhood image as the key word of his poetic theory.The West has a tradition of thinking about human existence and expressing literary thoughts through childhood.As an aesthetic connotation,childhood is closely related to people’s feelings.People in childhood have rich feelings,so childhood is praised by writers as an aesthetic element.Bachelard is deeply influenced by this tradition.He chooses the phenomenological method and critically drew on Freud’s psychoanalysis theory.Bachelard’s own childhood,his daughter’s childhood and his students’ childhood life are always the source of his imagination.His childhood life experience provides the basis for him to tell his childhood in the future.The second chapter expounds that Bachelard integrates the meaning of childhood into his poetic imagination and endows the concept of childhood with the connotation of poetic criticism.Compared with the reality of childhood,Bachelard-style childhood is poetic and full of vitality.To sum up,Bachelard’s childhood is in a nameless and lonely state.It has no history,no time and no specific events;It is the source of image and a prototype;It is a state of mind,expressing new ideas,and it represents Bachelard’s world ideal;Childhood has plant power,which hides in all stages of human life and nourishes human life.The third chapter mainly answers the question of how childhood,as the key word of Bachelard’s dream theory and poetic thought,relates to his poetic imagination.This article discusses the identity of poetry and childhood from three aspects:image,perception and language.Starting from the image of childhood,this paper probes into the continuity of Bachelard’s early element poetics and later dream poetics and space poetics.The fourth chapter aims to point out the value of Bachelard’s childhood image.Childhood,as an eternal image,enriches Bachelard’s poetic criticism and makes his poetics take on a personalized and unique style.As a part of his poetics,his childhood shows Bachelard’s passionate side beyond science and reason.Bachelard’s criticism based on images enriches literary criticism.In addition,the value of childhood is reflected in its ability to give people spiritual comfort and its search for the state of life in the noisy environment.Based on his era,he answers with his childhood dream how to restart life in a noisy environment and how to face the future life.From this perspective,the aesthetic image of childhood contains the meaning of cultural salvation.Bachelard’s writing of childhood images shows the importance of poetry and imagination to a person.The combination of childhood and poetry is a powerful call to imagination.Childhood is similar to poetry.It contains creative power in language and image,and plays a great role in improving the creativity of people and society.In thinking about human existence,because childhood not only carries the past,but also symbolizes the hope of new life,childhood and children are regarded as the foundation of life and the hope of future social development.In a word,in his poetical imagination,Bachelard endows the concept of childhood with the connotation of poetic criticism and enriches the aesthetic connotation of childhood.The childhood image discussed by Bachelard is a valuable theoretical resource for both literary criticism and childhood culture.