on shells

The concept that corresponds to a shell is so clear, so hard, and so sure that a poet, unable simply to draw it and, reduced rather to speaking of it, is at first at a loss for images. He is arrested in his flight towards dream values by the geometrical reality of the forms. And these forms are so numerous, often so original, that after a positive examination of the shell world, the imagination is defeated by reality.

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Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics Of Space’
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image: caroline muir