SOURCE: McAllester, Mary. “Bachelard Twenty Years On: An Assessment.” Revue de Litterature Comparee 58, no. 2 (April 1984): 165-76.

In the following essay, McAllester evaluates Bachelard's legacy as critic and philosopher.

Bachelard died in October 1962, leaving us a rich and singular legacy: some ninety publications in all, and twenty-three books—twelve on the philosophy of modern science, two on time and consciousness, nine on poetic imagination—published between 1928 and 1961, and a tenth book on poetry left unfinished when he died. What has become of this legacy in the last twenty years? Many have expressed their debt to Bachelard's books on poetic images, and he is generally held to have inspired “la nouvelle critique” of 1965 and after. His epistemology has been equally seminal; Georges Canguilhem, for instance, in Idéologie et rationalité, refers to “la leçon de Gaston Bachelard” which has inspired and fortified his “jeunes collègues”—this is in...