SOURCE: Kaplan, Edward K. “The Writing Cure: Gaston Bachelard on Baudelaire's Ambivalent Harmonies.” Symposium 41, no. 4 (winter 1987-1988): 278-91.

In the following essay, Kaplan maintains that “Bachelard's special focus on images of ambivalence in Charles Baudelaire's poetry, and their aesthetic resolution of existentially insurmountable contradictions, points to the energetic center of both philosopher and poet.”

Gaston Bachelard's brief, incisive, suggestive, and sometimes incomplete analyses of Baudelaire illuminate the philosopher's preoccupation with writing as a cure for death anxiety and essential solitude. As both theoretician and literary interpreter, Bachelard promoted a philosophy of free imagination and reading pleasure which hardly evokes such grim thoughts. He is known primarily as a philosopher of dreamed plenitude. While it is generally true that, as a critic, he pulls quotations out of their context to illustrate his phenomenology or metaphysics, his choice usually takes implicit account of the work's integrity. The networks of imagery...