first images

An excess of childhood is the germ of a poem . . . From poetic reverie, inspired by some great spectacle of the world to childhood reverie, there is a commerce of grandeur. And that is why childhood is at the origin of the greatest landscapes. Our childhood solitudes have given us the primitive immensities . . . The child sees everything big and beautiful. The reverie toward childhood returns us to the beauty of the first images.

-- Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Reverie
Translated by Daniel Russell