This book opens its readers to the titanic importance of setting in so much art from painting to poetry to fiction to autobiography. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard reveals time after time that setting is more than scene in works of art, that it is often the armature around which the work revolves. He elevates setting to its rightful place alongside character and plot, and offers readers a new angle of vision that reshapes any understanding of great paintings and novels, and folktales too. His is a work of genuine topophilia.

From the foreword to the 1994 edition, John R. Stilgoe