This book is beloved by readers and writers, thinkers and dreamers the world over, despite its sometimes recondite rhetoric and its always French intellectual élan. Metaphorically and metaphysically rich, Poetics follows the imagination into spaces that nourish and inspire it, “inside” realms within the world’s immensities that promise safe haven for the reveries that both define and enrich our lives. Bachelard begins with a philosophical anatomy of the house and a consideration of how inhabited space has a profound subconscious influence on how we perceive reality (houses, he explains, “are in us as much as we are in them”). Metaphorically and metaphysically rich, Poetics follows the imagination into spaces that nourish and inspire it, “inside” realms within the world’s immensities that promise safe haven for the reveries that both define and enrich our lives.