"The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams"
About this Quote
Poetry, for Bachelard, isn’t a mirror held up to reality so much as a contraband courier smuggling us back into inner experience. “Give back” is the operative phrase: it implies something stolen or misplaced, a loss so normalized we stop noticing it. Modern life trains us to treat dreams as disposable noise - private, irrational, unserious. Bachelard’s wager is that poetry reverses that hierarchy, returning dream logic not as escapism but as a usable mode of perception.
The line lands because it dodges the usual defense of art as “expression” or “beauty.” Function is a blunt, almost technical word, and it quietly frames poetry as a tool with an ethical job to do. He’s arguing against the idea that dreams are merely symbols to decode (the clinical, Freudian stance) or fantasy to outgrow (the industrial, rationalist stance). Instead, dreams are “situations” - lived scenes with texture, atmosphere, and emotional weather. Poetry doesn’t interpret them; it re-situates us inside them.
That emphasis on situation fits Bachelard’s broader project: a phenomenology of imagination attentive to houses, corners, drawers, nests - spaces where memory and reverie braid together. In the shadow of two world wars and accelerating mechanization, his claim reads like cultural resistance. Poetry becomes a way to reclaim interiority from systems that prefer us legible, productive, and awake. Dreams aren’t an escape hatch; they’re a suppressed homeland, and poems are the passport.
The line lands because it dodges the usual defense of art as “expression” or “beauty.” Function is a blunt, almost technical word, and it quietly frames poetry as a tool with an ethical job to do. He’s arguing against the idea that dreams are merely symbols to decode (the clinical, Freudian stance) or fantasy to outgrow (the industrial, rationalist stance). Instead, dreams are “situations” - lived scenes with texture, atmosphere, and emotional weather. Poetry doesn’t interpret them; it re-situates us inside them.
That emphasis on situation fits Bachelard’s broader project: a phenomenology of imagination attentive to houses, corners, drawers, nests - spaces where memory and reverie braid together. In the shadow of two world wars and accelerating mechanization, his claim reads like cultural resistance. Poetry becomes a way to reclaim interiority from systems that prefer us legible, productive, and awake. Dreams aren’t an escape hatch; they’re a suppressed homeland, and poems are the passport.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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