Gaston Bachelard, justifying his phenomenological method, emphasizes “the onset of the image in an individual consciousness,” provocatively states that “the poetic act has no past,” and asserts that “the image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship” (xv, xi, xv). Bachelard hedges his bets, qualifying the statement about the poetic act's having “no past” with “at least no recent past” (xi). And soon, admitting that while for him the image's primary effect “involves bringing about a veritable awakening of poetic creation, even in the soul of the reader, through the reverberations of a single poetic image,” a reverberation through which, “by going immediately beyond all psychology or psychoanalysis, we feel a poetic power rising naively within us,” nevertheless, “after the original reverberation, we are able to experience resonances, sentimental repercussions, reminders of our past.” But, he hastens to add, “the image has touched the depths before it stirs the surface” (xix).