Time & Perspective Quote by Gaston Bachelard

Bachelard treats poetry less as decoration than as a pressure test for what language can still do. Calling poetry "one of the destinies of speech" sounds almost fatalistic, but it is really an argument about potential: ordinary talk is built to manage the present (to label, to coordinate, to settle meaning). Poetry, by contrast, is where speech remembers it is not finished. It is a path language can take when it stops merely reporting the world and starts reconfiguring how the world can be felt.

The key move is in "image" and "newness". For Bachelard, the poetic image is not a clever metaphor extracted from experience; it is an event that happens in the reader. That is why it "opens a future to language": a genuinely fresh image does not just add another synonym or ornament. It forces words into unfamiliar alignments, widening what can be thought, sensed, and said. The future here is not technological progress but imaginative latitude - the expansion of possibility.

Context matters. Writing in a century shadowed by mechanized war and an ascendant scientific rationalism, Bachelard (a philosopher of science who also became a philosopher of reverie) refuses the idea that clarity and utility are language's highest virtues. The subtext is a quiet resistance to linguistic exhaustion: when political slogans, bureaucratic templates, and instrumental speech harden into cliché, poetry becomes a form of renewal. It does not escape reality; it rebuilds the tools with which reality is apprehended.