The Language Animal, Charles Taylor’s 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor’s exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language.
Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor’s magisterial work takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Miłosz, and beyond.
In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry’s reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving—too obviously true—to be ignored.
Preface
What is this book all about? This may seem a strange question to ask
before the book has properly begun. Te answer an author might
be tempted to give is just: read and see for yourself. But it could never-
the less help the reader if I set out the context in which the developments
I describe in the book took place.
Te short answer to the question I raised in the previous paragraph
could be: the book is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic
connection; by “connection” I mean not just any mode of awareness of
the surrounding world, but one shot through with joy, significance,
inspiration. My hypothesis is that the desire for this connection is a
human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of
human history, but that the forms this desire takes have been very dif-
ferent in the succeeding phases and stages of this history.
And what has also been different has been the name for what we seek
connection to. “Cosmos” is an older word. Today people talk about our
alienation from Nature, from the natural world, from “wilderness” (Tho-
reau’s “wildness”), from the environment which we have been treating
as a mere instrument, where it should really be a source of spiritual
nourishment.
In this book, I want to look at the last two centuries or so, starting from
the shift in literary and artistic sensibility that we tend to sum up with
the term “Romanticism,” in all its varied forms. I have chosen this shift
because it corresponds to a moment when the previously viable form of
cosmic connection became unviable.
In this earlier mode, cosmic connection involved the invocation of
orders structuring the cosmos which distinguished higher from lower realities, self-realizing orders on the model of Platonic forms; schemes
like Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being, or the Kabbalah, which defined the
higher reality powering the merely visible / tangible world we live in.
Starting in the seventeenth century, belief in these orders had been
steadily undermined, under the growing influence of modern science,
principally the Galilean-Newtonian natural science foregrounding the
laws of material reality.
The Romantic period, beginning in Germany in the 1790s, was the
moment in which the drive to cosmic connection started to take another
form. This book begins with an attempt to characterize this form, in
which works of art take on a crucial role. I will be mainly concerned with
some poets of this period. Their works bypass the philosophical objections to the belief in cosmic orders but generate in the reader the felt sense
of a reality higher and deeper than the everyday world around us.
There are parallel movements in the music and visual art of the time,
but I will speak mainly in this book about poetry.
Te shift from cosmic orders to those invoked by some poets of the
period (for instance, Wordsworth or Hölderlin) involved what I call an
“epistemic retreat.” They generate a powerful experiential sense of cosmic
order but stop short of affirming the reality of these orders in the objective world beyond human experience.
As the nineteenth century passes, and the scientific picture of the uni-
verse reveals an immensely enlarged timescale and truly cataclysmic
cosmic transformations, even the experience of continuing order loses its
force, and the aspiration to cosmic connection shifts to the time dimension, and involves larger shapes and patterns in time, and access to what
I will call “higher times.” I will start to examine this changeover through
the work of Baudelaire.
But some of the most significant poetry invoking higher times comes
with early twentieth-century “modernism” (Eliot) and continues in the
work of Czesław Miłosz.
The book ends with Chapters 15 and 16. Chapter 16 attempts to look
up and out from the last two centuries, and see what can be said about
the perennial longing for cosmic connection, in its changing forms.
Chapter 15 is an excursus, which attempts a (too ambitious?) sketch
of the history of ethical growth, drawing on the felt connections in the
time dimension discussed in the previous two chapters on Eliot and Miłosz.
This is, as we are informed at the beginning of its first chapter, a follow-up to Taylor’s The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity (2016) — a book that traces Heidegger’s ‘language as the house of being’ back to the German Romantics, their poetic gestalt, as against the linguistic atomism that Taylor fines in Kant’s metaphysics, and their understanding that ‘the world within language is much bigger than the world without it’. It also, as per its subtitle, follows-on from Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007). It is a reading of a number of Romantic and post-Romantic poets: Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Novalis, Shelley, Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, T S Eliot and Czesław Miłosz. The main theme is: these poets actualize, by the genius of their poetic expression, the reconnection of man and cosmos, the coming-together and re-enchantment of the world. As Bill and Ted might have put it: cosmic, dude.
It is, in all, a strange, sprawly, clumsy book. To read it as an intervention into the study of Romanticism and post- Romanticism is to be struck by its radical paucity and antiquity of critical engagement, and the oddnesses of focus and emphasis, what is rather pointedly not discussed. One can’t cover everything, of course, but there’s a slackness in the writing here that could have been tightened, to allow more content. It’s a long but not a dense book, and the prose throughout meandery and unfocused. So, although this is a book centrally about the way German Romanticism embodied in language a cosmic connectivity, and the way these linguistic and poetic works influenced and manifested through English and American Romantic and post-Romantic writing, the two key figures for the translation of German literature and thought into English are not addressed: Coleridge is mentioned only in passing and Carlyle not mentioned at all. Taylor draws on M H Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and Earl Wasserman’s The Subtler Language (1959): old school. There are occasional mentions of more recent critics — Jonathan Bate’s ecocriticism is praised, the Keats chapter brings in Helen Vendler — but nothing very up to date, or wide-ranging. Many of the footnotes refer the reader to other books by Charles Taylor. A grasp of the larger context of Romanticist criticism and theory is not there. As Taylor’s opening chapter works through ‘the Romantic notion of the Symbol, confusingly also referred to by some writers as “allegory”’, and the way metaphor, and poetry, ‘can go dead’ [15], you want to urge him to read Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book and de Man’s ‘Rhetoric of Temporality’ essay, and to stop reinventing the wheel. (Benjamin is mentioned later on, but only with reference to his essay on Baudelaire, and also for Taylor to insert a strange, off-the-point footnote: ‘I would like to call into question Benjamin’s too rapid and too-simple dismissing of the aura, both in his Baudelaire essay and in the “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility”. Is it really so clear that reproducible works — eg films — lack “aura”?’ [297]). There’s no Byron, one glancing reference to Blake that is merely puzzling (CT claims Blake ‘looks forward to an apocalyptic eschatology, in which humans are united in a harmonious brotherhood, inspired by Christianity as he understood it’ [142] — hard to think of a less eschatological poet than Blake, really), no Tennyson, Hugo, Browning, Yeats or Stevens. Beethoven’s symphonies are praised, but there’s no real discussion of any other music. There’s nothing on Gothic, the dark underside of Romanticism; almost nothing on female writers or artists. And there is no sense in this book of the political or historical contexts of Romanticism — that age of revolution and war, of economic depression and urgent political action. Taylor’s Shelley has no political dimension at all: he believes not in revolution but ‘in a power underlying all, like that developing Nature’ [140], and his art seeks ‘to liberate us from an oppressive, self-denying moral-religious code — analogous to the later aspiration of Nietzsche to take us “beyond good and evil”.’ Say what? The same Shelley who wrote ‘the great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause’? The Shelley of ‘England 1819’ and ‘The Masque Of Anarchy’?
The Miłosz chapter touches on politics, a little, as how could it not, but Taylor really isn’t interested in this. Nazism and Communism were bad, he says, as was Polish nationalism — this fact being ‘obvious in the case of Nazism’, and also with Marxism, at least in its ‘Leninist variant which counted on state violence, endless purges and elimination of whole categories of enemies’, such that where socialism is concerned ‘the heart of darkness was clearly unavoidable’ [531]. This is far too crude a frame in which to read Miłosz’s complicated relationship with his own Polishness, and the Marxist dream. For Taylor, history is a nightmare from which Miłosz was trying to awaken, and away from which he fled into nature, and that’s all.
As literary criticism, Cosmic Connections really isn’t very good. Much poetry is quoted, often at length, sometimes at great length (pages 100–104 are one long quotation from a single Hölderlin poem) but there’s really nothing by way of close-reading, no attention to the linguistic and formal specificities of the text. Instead there are generalizing statements, which the passages of poetry are offered to illustrate. Taylor quotes a bit of Arnold’s ‘Buried Life’ to show that we have a buried life. He quotes Baudelaire on Spleen to show that we are sometimes melancholy and bored and trapped, and also to suggest a therapeutic theory of art (‘what does this poetry do? It begins to transform our experience. It articulates Spleen, and this is a first step toward reversing it’ [277]). Sometimes Taylor adds notation of personalized reaction. For example he quotes from Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ (he calls this poem ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’, which may be an autocorrect relict) — ‘perhaps the most famous poem in the German language’ he says — with its advice on immersing ourselves in nature to find peace, ‘Ruhe’. Then we get:
"Take my reaction (not only mine) to this poem. ‘Balde / Ruhest du auch.’ There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I still don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it. Where did I get it? From Goethe. Yes, true, but incomplete. Goethe’s poem makes for me the connection between this longed-for peace and the hushed stillness of the forest/mountain. He makes it that my sense of this stillness opens my aspiration to this deeper peace. (And perhaps I might experience something like this on my own, later, as I wander the forest)."[68]
It’s difficult to know what to make of this. Here Taylor glosses two stanzas from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’:
"It is hard to describe this, but what we see/feel here in each of these stanzas is a fusion of some of the most moving features into a more intense image." [146]
The most moving features of what? What image? This sentence seems to suggest that Taylor has been moved by Keats’s poem — as he may very well be — without going beyond the opening assertion of analytical impotence. In general, Taylor finds Keats an ingenuous preacher of cosmic connection and transcendent unity, which strikes me as flattening and wrong, actually. For Taylor, there is nothing complex, nothing ironic in Keats’s beauty-truth equivalence. It is a straightforward statement of connection:
"Beauty and Truth come into existence together. Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation." [144]
I think this misses the complex ironies, as well as the political engagement, of Keats. But it’s Taylor’s keynote, and he strikes it over and over.
The ‘central theme’ of his discussion in the book as a whole, Taylor tells us, is ‘(re-)connection. The prefix “re” here reflects the sense of loss and then recovery’. Then he discusses ‘order’:
"The order is also reflected in human society. This means that attempts to upset it, subvert it, will be resisted. When Macbeth kills Duncan, horses rise up against their masters, because the upsetting of order in the society (regicide!) triggers off repercussions in the larger cosmos. "[252]
Not to be a pedant, but Duncan’s horses did rather more than ‘rise up against their masters’
"OLD MAN. Tis said, they ate each other.
ROSSE. They did so
To th’amazement of mine eyes that look’d upon’t." [Macbeth, 2:4]
Sometimes Taylor is offhand in his readings. Of Théophile Gautier’s Émaux et Camées (1852) he breezily says ‘Gautier explores new dimensions of feeling about the world, love, and so on’ [383]. That’s all we get. And so on. Taylor starts his analysis of Rilke’s ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ with the no-shit-Sherlock observation: ‘they [the poems] call on Orpheus, the singer-god. Hence “Sonnets to Orpheus”’. Then he gives over three pages to lengthy quotation from the texts, and finally sums-up by saying ‘the sonnets extend [Rilke’s poetic vision] in a host of new directions and offer their own original views on our present condition’ [242], without specifying what the direction is, or what views on our present condition are articulated. Instead he says: ‘ — but I can’t take things further now.’ Which makes one wonder why the poems are in the book at all. A long account of Mallarmé ends in a confession of even franker failure: Mallarmé ‘seems very difficult’, Taylor says, adding musingly ‘why do we (including me) strive so hard to unravel the mystery [of] Mallarmé’s mature poetry?’ Then a sudden swerve into purple prose:
"Phrases of his, even (maybe especially) those that we ill understand, remain in our memory like fires which illuminate a starless night: each one a source of renewed joy. "[472]
But this is impressionism, not actual criticism.
The book is handsomely produced good quality paper, well-bound, lovely typeface; but it has been poorly proof-read (‘Wwhen’, 446). Nor has it been fact-checked, a pity since Taylor is often slightly skew in his references. He says: ‘the Deutschland came to grief in the Thames on December 7, 1875’ [166] — actually she was wrecked at dawn on December 6th, in the North Sea: 23 miles east of Harwich, not in the Thames Estuary. Trivial errors, but irksome. Awkward to suggest Leopardi’s ‘L’infinito’ is indebted to Keats’s odes [158], when the former was written in 1819 and the latter not published until 1820. Taylor quotes Ariel’s song as ‘The Tempest act 2 scene 2’:
"Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones is coral made."
— when the song is in Act 1 scene 2, and the second line is actually ‘Of his bones are coral made’. Wordsworth’s ‘a spirit that impels/All thinking things, all objects of all thought’ is quoted as ‘All thinking things, all objects of thought’ [18] Lots of little things like that.
A ‘Note on Symbolism’ describes, reasonably enough, ‘a certain school of thought about the nature of poetry, as well as the practice of certain poets during the later nineteenth-century’: but though Mallarmé admired him, it’s not right to cite Swinburne as a member of that school [473]. Monet’s ‘arresting studies of light on haystacks,’ we are told, ‘were linked to his Buddhist convictions’ [246]: but Monet, baptized a Catholic, died an atheist, did not subscribe to any such convictions. We read on. ‘With Eliot and Pound, but also with James and Conrad, we are in the epoch of what has been called “modernism”’ [528]. Eliot and Pound were Modernists, you say? Worth $30.65 of anyone’s money to uncover that earth-shaking news.
"Earlier novelists, like Jane Austen and Dickens, were grounded in a clear ethic, one which would have been recognizable to the majority of people in their time … This kind of framework was missing in the works of the modernists." [528]
It would come as a surprise to D H Lawrence that he lacked a clear ethic — or indeed to James, Woolf, Proust, Broch, or, in his malign way, Wyndham Lewis.
" ‘To Autumn’ certainly gives us a vision of what reconciliation might feel like, but could or did the author really feel/live this reconciliation? "[157]
The author is dead, dude. Stick to the texts.
"Earlier Romantic poetry had a ritual-like nature." [189]
No it didn’t. I mean, really.
A long portion of chapter 13, ‘The Waste Land Commented’, goes through the whole of Eliot’s poem, quoting liberally and describing — but not analyzing — as it proceeds: quotation, then: ‘and then another voice enters, Marie … there follows another voice’. Quotation, then: … “A Game of Chess” opens in a beautiful and richly furnished room, then the passage segues into a conversation between a nervous and frightened woman who seeks reassurance from her spouse/lover’ and so on — really, right through the poem. Taylor quotes the ‘Death by Water’ section entire, and says: ‘There is a catharsis here.’ This seems to be using catharsis in a way I’ve not encountered before: ‘it represents a rising to a higher realm, beyond the fruitless and demeaning search for amorous conquests. And the fact that this also means death will not have been seen by Eliot as a drawback, then and later’ [499]. Drawback? That final sentence has no main verb. Taylor’s preference for subsummation of difference into cosmic connection means that he can see only a kind of blissful consummation here, ‘entering the element where all difference, between profit and loss, age and youth, Gentile or Jew, are wiped clean’; rather than an inscription of Eliot’s anti-Semitism and sense of civilizational erosion. Taylor could usefully have engaged with some, or any, recent criticism on Eliot — for instance, Anthony Julius’s T.S. Eliot, Anti-semitism, and Literary Form (CUP 1995) — but the only critical works referenced in the footnotes to this lengthy section are Matthiessen’s The Achievement of T S Eliot (1935) and, er, Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989). Finally Taylor essays a judgement on the whole poem, gropingly enough:
"What are we to think? That the poem fails in what it set out to do? Perhaps not. Perhaps we can still see the work as a whole as attempting the kind of empty marker that I described but not as simple failure. It makes some headway toward defining the direction in which one must search but leaves more to be done. In the meanwhile he offers a beautiful and compelling description of his world, the aftermath of the Great War, which slaughtered young men in their millions. What was it all for? … What is human life for?" [502]
This is flaccid and banal. But all of Taylor’s readings are straight-down-the-middle obviousnesses. Wordsworth is Nature; Baudelaire is Spleen; Hopkins is all inscape and God; Mallarmé is the music of language and so on. Man rambles around some poems he likes. Taylor is a significant philosopher and commentor on the metaphysical tradition. I’m not persuaded he is a very good literary critic.
Charles Taylor, “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (Harvard University Press 2024). By Adam Roberts. Medium , July 3, 2024.
Enlightenment liberalism fragmented the world by neglecting the social nature of the self, Taylor contends, but the Romantics can tell us how to restore a shared sense of meaning and purpose.
A hard thinker to pigeonhole, Taylor has long been a mainstay of Canada’s social-democratic left; he helped found the New Democratic Party, running for office several times in Quebec, though losing, inevitably, to the Liberal Party and the charismatic Pierre Trudeau. He’s also a Catholic and a singularly eloquent critic of individualism and secularism, those two pillars of modern liberalism. He worries about the modern conception of the self—what he has called “the punctual self”—which he takes to be rooted in Enlightenment thought, and about the primacy it accords to autonomy, reason, and individual rights. By wresting our identities away from a sense of community and common purpose, the new “atomist-instrumental” model was, he thinks, bound to produce our familiar modern alienation. We became estranged from a sense of belonging and meaning. We experienced the attenuation of the citizen-participation politics we need. We wanted to be alone, and now we are. With this analysis, critical of the foundations of liberalism without betraying liberal values, Taylor manages to be at once precise and prophetic. He may be the most well-regarded philosopher in the English-speaking world, having snatched most of the big prizes, including the million-dollar Berggruen Prize, in 2016. There are now books about his books, study guides and Web sites dedicated to indexing his œuvre.
When I was a kid, growing up in Montreal around McGill University, where Taylor taught for more than three decades, he was a significant if troubling presence: not personally troubling—quite the opposite, he was an amiable faculty friend—but troubling because, in my own science-worshipping (what the other side would have called “positivist”) faculty family, Taylor’s rehabilitation of Hegel seemed almost sinister. Of such matters are quarrels made in Barchester.
Nonetheless, at some point I began to read Taylor, first with the fascination of the forbidden and then with ever-increasing pleasure. Though Taylor was defending a German idealist tradition that a more empirical-minded tradition had denounced as mere verbiage and wind, he had spent a formative period in the precincts of ordinary-language philosophy at Oxford, where he was mentored by Isaiah Berlin; he spoke the plainer dialects of Anglo-American philosophy. (The phone calls were coming from inside the house.) Indeed, he felt that Berlin had abandoned philosophy for the history of ideas because the moral philosophy of his day was too parched to capture the complexities Berlin cared about.
As a social and political theorist, Taylor emphasized the primacy of shared experience—the idea that identity resides within communities rather than inside brains—without succumbing to nostalgia for some lost organic society. What matters most in life to actual people, he has argued, is not the standard liberal question “Who am I?” but the richer humanist question “Where am I going?” In expansive volumes such as “Sources of the Self” and “A Secular Age,” he has stalked, like a soft-footed cat, a “naturalist” view of humanity which assimilates our minds and morals to a purely materialist and empirical program of study. We are not atoms in a mindless universe, he argues, but agents in a metaphysically alert one, embodied and embedded in meanings we jointly create. Art is not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.
Taylor’s new book is formidably chewy, with page after page featuring passages of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Rilke, offered both in the original German and in translation. Long analyses of T. S. Eliot and Milosz arrive, too. But, though Taylor’s subjects are often severely abstract, his sentences are lucid, even charmingly direct, and his purpose is plain. We once lived in an “enchanted” universe of agreed-upon meaning and common purpose, where we looked at the night sky and felt that each object was shaped with significance by a God-given order. Now we live in the modern world the Enlightenment produced—one of fragmented belief and broken purposes, where no God superintends the cosmos, common agreement on meaning is no longer possible, and all you can do with the moon is measure it. “I admire the moon as a moon, just a moon,” Lorenz Hart sighed, with memorable modernity, adding, significantly, “Nobody’s heart belongs to me today.” Enlightened, we are alone.
Romantic poetry—the poetry of Shelley and Keats, in English, of Novalis and Hölderlin, in German—first diagnosed this fracture (the argument goes) and offered a way to heal it. Where neoclassical poets like Alexander Pope appealed to an ordered world, with clear meanings and a hierarchy of kinds, the Romantics recognized that this was no longer credible. The enchanted world had been replaced by the modern world. We could hardly go back toward ignorance—Goethe, one of Taylor’s heroes, participated in the modern world as a scientist—but we had to find a way to reënchant it. The best way to heal the wound is through poetry and music, of the sort that doesn’t offer propositions but casts spells and enacts rituals. The arts are not subsidiary places of secondary sensations but the primary place where we go to recall feelings of wholeness, of harmony not just with “Nature”—the craggy peaks the Romantics loved and the Italian lakes they lingered by—but with existence itself. Poetry and music do this by escaping the constraints of intellect, by going at things atmospherically rather than argumentatively. They convey a sublime atmosphere of sound, ineffable intimations of immortality, and so the apprehension of a “cosmic connection.”
Taylor reproduces lines from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (“And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of thought”) and tells us, “To let oneself be carried by this passage is to experience a strong sense of connection, far from clearly defined . . . but deeply felt; a connection not static, but which flows through us and our world.” Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” is similarly effervescent in diction, similarly ethereal in effect. The lines “O for a beaker full of the warm South, / Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, / With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth” cast a spell as much as they describe a feeling. Taylor writes, “The rhythmic flow between the features as recounted in the poem somehow encounters, meets, connects up with the flow between the features as we live it.” Classical art, he argues, moves us by convincing us; Romantic art convinces us by moving us.
Taylor is challenging the belief that science provides objective truth, and art mere subjective feeling—that art produces sensations, and what you make of the sensations is all up to you. He insists that there is intrinsic, grounded human value in the experience of art. At one point, he constructs a table in which he contrasts things toward which our attitudes are subjective with things that have hard, biological significance: I may prefer vanilla ice cream to strawberry, but I must have air to breathe. Is listening to Beethoven, he asks, more like preferring vanilla ice cream or more like needing to breathe? Or does it, as Taylor is convinced, belong to the realm of ethical elevation? Perhaps hearing late Beethoven is more like seeing that viral video of a small Chinese boy meticulously cooking a meal of egg fried rice for his still smaller sibling than it is like the experience of eating the egg fried rice. “Strong ethical insights are grounded in what I called ‘felt intuitions,’ ” Taylor writes. “Someone couldn’t be said to have a moral conviction about universal human rights, for instance, if she wasn’t prone on the appropriate occasions to experience them, to feel them as inspiring (hearing the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), and their flagrant violation as appalling.” We are convinced because we are moved. The reasoning may seem circular—I know it’s inspiring because it feels inspiring—but his point is that what great modern poetry does is to encircle us with inspiring feelings.
Art isn’t absolute, but it isn’t at all arbitrary. Taylor escapes from the divide between subjectivity and objectivity through a concept he calls the “interspace”—not the inner space where I perceive and enjoy but some resonant atmosphere that exists between me and the world. The sound of the cello in a Schubert trio isn’t entirely in the cello, where the sound begins, or entirely between my listening ears, where the experience of structured sound as music happens, but somewhere between the two, where the creation of meaning takes place. The interspace is the phenomenal field of the arts. When we listen to sublime music, then, our experience is not of pleasure but of an overwhelming feeling of encountering and exploring some truth. The music sculpts us, we sculpt the music, and to reduce this to mood misses the cosmic connection that the experience proposes and, quite often, provides.
All of this is attractive, directed at some unnamed but quite easily imagined contemporary Gradgrind who thinks that poetry is mere décor and music mere entertainment (in a footnote, Taylor cites Steven Pinker’s provocation that music is “auditory cheesecake”), and who scoffs at the conviction of aesthetes and humanists that music and art contain a kind of knowledge. Most readers will respond to Taylor’s contagious excitement in the presence of Wordsworth and Rilke and Beethoven. His are ideas that one assents to enthusiastically even while realizing that it would be hard to defend them to someone less inclined to assent. Indeed, one recalls the spiral of puzzled questions that apostles of the arts regularly encounter from the science-minded, who insist that when we invoke the ethical allure of music we’re just saying we really like those fuzzy feelings. If Taylor’s experiential enthusiasms sometimes do not seem too far away from the lyrics to “Misty” (“Walk my way and a thousand violins begin to play”), well, being misty about something is a precondition of transcendence, even if it’s only that old black magic called love. And so the interspace between Taylor and the art-infatuated reader is likely to be one of enthusiastic assent: Yes, it does feel like that! Yes, it is a big experience. Yes, I feel the cosmos. When I browse through Spotify, passing from Ray Charles to the obscurer singers of the Stax/Volt catalogue, each stop along the way offers some experience of common space which is not just diverting but deeply reassuring. Yes, there is meaning in the mess; yes, the space says yes.
The last fifty pages of “Cosmic Connections” pivot decisively from the intricacies of poetic imagination to the specifics of contemporary American and Canadian (and, secondarily, European) politics—toward the social interspace, so to speak. A long section turns to questions of white supremacy, civil rights, national identity, the rise of Trumpist populism, and so on. A successful self-governing republic, Taylor believes, requires a community of shared purpose and a common space of deliberation. Antagonistic groups must go beyond the narrow aspiration of winning a contest against adversaries and come to one another with a sense of mutual recognition and regard. And the people best able to make this case, in Taylor’s view, “are people who are deeply rooted in their spiritual sources, often religious.” These are people who, at least culturally, have retained a sense of the sacred. Overcoming discrimination becomes not just an abstract advance in justice or an instrumental strategy for minimizing conflict but a “source of deep fulfillment.”
Taylor is a believer in the importance of place; one does not provincialize his work by situating it within the province it comes from. Born in Montreal, Taylor was shaped by the peculiar social fabric of Quebec. The communal connection among Québécois remains unusually strong. It’s reinforced by linguistic isolation, which outside Montreal often produces an inward-turning monolingual culture, and in Montreal an outward-turning bilingual one. The Catholic Church has collapsed as a living force, but it provides a cultural scaffolding in which much else still takes place. (The holiday celebrating the now secularized cause of Quebec nationalism is a religious one: June 24th, Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day.) Quebec is openly cosmopolitan in affect and narrowly communal in arrangement, and, for the most part, the two forces contest peaceably.
Taylor is inclined by his experience to think that the communal and the cosmopolitan can coexist. You can belong to a tribe and still belong to the people. The “politics of recognition” that Taylor has recommended gives weight, accordingly, to the demands that communities—ethnic, religious, or otherwise—make on the state. Given Taylor’s emphasis on the embodied dimensions of social meaning, it seems significant that he was reared in a bicultural household; his mother was a Francophone Catholic, and his father an Anglophone Protestant. McGill is a great English-speaking university in the midst of a French-speaking city, and though its autonomy and financing is threatened from time to time by the provincial government, it has survived through even the most extreme independence-minded administrations. Montreal is a very good place to nourish the belief that communities can supply meaning without fomenting mayhem.
The link Taylor wants to make between his readings of poetry and his civics lessons has affinities to the proposals made by a number of writers—many of them Catholic, significantly—throughout the modern period: the meticulous remaking of ritual (which you find in Chesterton and Tolkien alike), the love of the local, the revaluing of ceremony and communal spirit as things essential in themselves rather than leftovers from a barbaric past. The wrong kind of politics, Taylor implies, arises from the loss of a cosmic connection which the Romantics first sensed, and which now is part of the unhappy inheritance of our civilization. Alienated and disconnected, the Trump voter, the Brexiteer, the Le Pen supporter turns to theatricalized reassurances of fascist-style unity, predicated on the demonization of the nearby other. Taylor celebrates Pope Francis’s encyclicals on extended families, with their sense of the common good, and those Native religions which get their sense of the sacred from a specific place of dwelling. He turns again to the interspace, now lofted to become not only the theatre of reception and communication between artist and audience but also the implicit space of political community.
The turn from poetry to politics is certainly seductive, but is it persuasive? Certain objections rise even in the mind of the reader stirred by these kinds of accounts. First, and simplest: Should we be so enchanted by “enchantment”? Taylor treats the change from the enchanted world to the post-Enlightenment naturalistic world as a change from one climate of opinion to another, rather than as any kind of progress. But “progress” does seem to be the right word for it: life in the “enchanted” world was poorer, briefer, uglier, and more brutal. The opposition of the enchanted and the disenchanted—one world lacking in technological power but rich in communal spirit, the other rich in machines but poor in soul—is tilted toward the past. To put it plainly, the “disenchanted” universe is one where, increasingly, human suffering is resolved by vaccination and effective drugs, not by bleeding and cupping.
Taylor’s response would be to point out that, if we have to look past leprosy and death in childbirth in chronicling the enchanted, we also have to look past Treblinka, the killing fields, Wounded Knee, and more in chronicling the disenchanted. Yet such a rejoinder is corrosive of the neat division between the two worlds he makes. Though he never says it directly, the atmospherics of Taylor’s book suggest that great music is an agent of moral growth. So you can wonder what it would be like if we had a civilization where Romantic music was the soundtrack of the people, and where even military victories and defeats were celebrated through the allure of symphonic sound. In fact, such a society existed—in the Third Reich of the nineteen-forties. Loving Schubert and Beethoven, it seems, gets you nowhere at all ethically.
And then the question arises of whether the alteration between the enchanted and the enlightened is really the historical one proposed by Taylor’s Hegelian model, with its emphasis on an unfolding one-way plot, or, rather, a permanent tension in all literate times. Shakespeare’s language, as Taylor hints at various moments, is structured by a pull between inherited magic and Renaissance cynicism. Ted Hughes made the point that Shakespeare stood balanced on a knife’s edge between myth and measurement, between an old, fairy-tale world and a new, empirical one. There’s visionary language in the sonnets that seems to say almost more than we can understand (“the prophetic soul / Of the wide world dreaming on things to come”) and acerbic worldliness right next door (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”). Enchanted and enlightened sensibilities rise throughout history and seem two points in the cycle of human possibility more than two moments in fixed historical sequence.
A third point relates to Taylor’s particular appetite for poetry. He likes the sides of Keats and Wordsworth that are ineffable, symbolic, atmospheric, and mystically resonant. But this taste can lead him, so to speak, to miss the ice cubes in the tumbler while seeking the iceberg in the ocean. Romantic poetry gets some of its meaning by overwhelming us, but it also gets meaning by making a disputable case. There’s a lot of atmosphere in Romantic poetry, but also a lot of argument. Shelley was obsessed with the scientific findings of his day, and they showed up in his verse. Keats’s claim that “beauty is truth, truth beauty” is contestable on its own terms, and the subsequent claim that this is all we need to know puts one in mind of the philosopher’s favorite T-shirt: “Surely not everybody was kung-fu fighting.” One hates to pit one great Polish poet against another, but Taylor’s book might have benefitted by having a little more Szymborska and a little less Milosz, since she gets an effect quite as Romantic as her counterpart’s simply by inventorying the actual world of peeled onions and doctors’ offices. Humanistic inquiry may not be susceptible to strict empirical measurement or evolutionary explanation. But it remains rational, forcing us to argue out our tastes and values. To treat art as a question of personal taste is, as Taylor thinks, reductive, but it’s also impractical. It is to forget that almost all we ever do is argue about taste—and the good arguments often ask how art corresponds to our experience or shines light on our values.
Taylor extolls the communities of meaning that are drawn together by the interspace of enchantment. Yet, as he would be the first to acknowledge, such communities are, first of all, communities of practice. We learn to listen, just as we learn to read. Learning to love Beethoven’s music is first to love the sound, then to find it achingly long-winded, then to sustain concentration, then to find the concentration rewarded by new understanding—only to return to the pleasure of the sound.
The interspace is an arena of shared education as much as of solitary epiphany. Ritual without reason has led modernity in many wrong directions. Practical communities are as valuable as poetic communities. The experiences Taylor evokes of being overwhelmed by aesthetic responses scarcely distinguishable from ethical elevation are ones we encounter daily—exploring a stranger’s playlist of Chuck Berry and his precursors, reading a newly sent poem, or seeing an Instagram Story of children in a distant land sharing a meal. The interspace is enchanted mainly in its normalcy. Perhaps connecting with the cosmos is not as hard as philosophers sometimes imagine. It’s where we live.
"Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden wrote in 1939. The philosopher Charles Taylor disagrees. In his new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, Taylor has set out to mount a defense of poetry that understands it as a secular form of ritual. Against the temptation to think of poetry as a purely descriptive activity in which experiences, feelings, and perspectives are simply recorded in verse, Taylor’s book tries to prove that poetry produces, by means of its language, experiences of connection that modernity has rendered otherwise obsolete.
When William Wordsworth writes in “Tintern Abbey,” for instance, that he has
Felt
A presence that disturbs [him] with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion, and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things,
he is describing exactly the poetic experience that Taylor has in mind. Whereas in earlier epochs religious ritual had the special purpose of producing “a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused,” in the Romantic period poetry that come to take on that role. The “disenchantment” of Taylor’s subtitle — the worldly rationalist attitude that Max Weber thought was the price of modernity — is the ailment that poetry promises to cure. At a moment when, as Taylor has it, religiously inflected paradigms of thinking were being discarded — chief among them the belief that language could accurately reflect some divine order — Romantic poets and their heirs cultivated a language of what Taylor calls “reconnection,” a language which takes our “links with the cosmos” and makes them “palpable for you in a way which moves you and hence restores your link to them.”
At the heart of Taylor’s book is a story about language. Its animating question is, how we can believe in language’s power to do important and valuable things in the world when our words are no longer reflective of any divine order? The book’s guiding answer is that poetry demonstrates the capacity of language to establish “connections” that are otherwise impossible to come by. In the extensive readings that follow the book’s introductory chapters, Taylor shows how the poetry of Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Keats, Novalis, Shelley, Baudelaire, Hopkins, Rilke, Mallarmé, and T.S. Eliot puts readers in contact with experiences of divine harmony, of supernatural order, of a joy which is the direct result of a situated haecceity, which is to say, of the thisness of poetic experience. Language is not incidental to these experiences, but constitutive of them.
In this regard, Cosmic Connections follows from Taylor’s earlier book, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. In that work, Taylor dismantled what he called the “designative” view of language propounded by thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac, which reduces the purpose of words to the transmission of information and the encoding of thought. Taylor argued instead for what he called the “constitutive” view, which emphasizes the distinctly creative capacities of language to “mak[e] possible new purposes, new levels of behavior, new meanings.” Readers familiar with the philosophy of performative speech acts that J.L. Austin put forward in How to Do Things with Words might detect a familiar note here, for Austin’s project, too, involved overturning a philosophy — in his case, Gottlob Frege’s — which treated language purely in terms of veracity, information, and truth. But unlike How to Do Things with Words, which famously relegated poetry to the realm of the “parasitic,” The Language Animal frequently resorted to literature to support its arguments, and it concluded with the enticing promise that Taylor’s next book would show how Romantic and post-Romantic poetry incorporated the theories of language that set The Language Animal in motion. So whereas Austin holds that poetry does nothing with words, Taylor, in Cosmic Connections, tries to show us what it does.
The problem is that Cosmic Connections ends up leaving the brilliance of The Language Animal behind. In fact, although the one book is billed as an extension of the other, there is a fundamental disconnection between the two. The Language Animal sought to provide a theoretical account of language use. Cosmic Connections, by contrast, is an essentially historical argument, hinging as it does on a claim that is about intellectual influence. In Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, Taylor seeks to find the stamp of the theories of language that were codified by Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the German philosophers whom Taylor treats as the progenitors of “constitutive” theories of language. But setting aside the fact that Taylor never meaningfully traces any lines of influence from philosophers to poets, this intellectual history comes close to undoing the theoretical foundation which The Language Animal established. If Romantic poetry needs Hermann, Herder, and Humboldt behind it in order to generate “connections” in keeping with a constitutive theory of language, then that theory turns out to be limited by history. This wouldn’t be a problem if The Language Animal didn’t aspire to account, as its subtitle tells us, for “the full shape of the human linguistic capacity.” This is a transhistorical aspiration, which gets admirably borne out by Taylor’s earlier book, but strangely undercut by his latest. No longer, it turns out, does the constitutive theory of language underpin all language use, but only language used in the wake of a few German philosophers.
This perspective requires the creation of some peculiar straw men. Taylor notes at various points that the Romantic period marks a break with previous epochs thanks, in no small part, to its operative theories of language. In the late Renaissance, we are told, there was a “notion of an ideal language whose terms would figure or capture the essence of the realities they designate, such as the ‘Adamic’ language, or the Creation considered as a book which communicated a message alongside the Bible … [or] Lovejoy’s ‘principle of plenitude,’ or Paracelsus’s ‘signatures,’ the Hermetic theories, or the Kabbalah, to mention some of the best known examples.” Cosmic Connections leans heavily on these “ideal language” theories and their conceptual limitations, because they are necessary in order conceive of the Romantic period as a break with earlier epochs.
While it is true that such theories existed in the Renaissance, it is suggestive that Taylor has little interest in searching for others. If he did, he would have had to account for one of the most important theories of language use of the period, a theory that was also, as it happens, a practice: rhetoric, the widespread, institutionalized revival of which furnished the early modern period with its own “constitutive” theory — and practice — of language use. Reckoning with the history of early modern rhetoric would have required Taylor to concede that the period was not as beholden as he claims to Adamic or Kabbalistic or other “ideal languages.” The epochal break he wishes to stress was not as severe as he claims. In fact, the aesthetic project of Romanticism was frequently motivated by the revival of medieval and early modern poetic forms, but Cosmic Connections paints itself into a corner from which this project cannot be acknowledged.
It is easy to fault a writer for lapses in historical coverage: there’s always something else to cite, and more one could say about the past. But the problem with Cosmic Connections is not simply that it does not provide a thorough enough account of early modernity. It is that the book places excessive faith in a few theorists of language, at the cost of actual situated uses of language. One need only read Petrarch, or Christopher Marlowe, or John Milton to see that, whatever certain theorists of language at the time believed, the actual uses of literary language in the period reflected a conviction in the power of words to do more than reflect their worlds. This is not a historiographical problem, but a disciplinary one: Cosmic Connections is a book that seeks to unite literary criticism and anthropology under the aegis of intellectual history. Yet intellectual history can provide only a limited set of tools when it comes to accounting for what poets do with their words. It is true that the language of poetry establishes forms of connection with its readers. But for this point to be more than a mere banality, the resources of literary criticism are required. For Cosmic Connections, they turn out to be in short supply. Their absence raises questions about how much any history of ideas can illuminate literary objects of study.
Taylor is on firmer ground when he turns his attention to an 18th-century poem like Alexander Pope’s “Windsor-Forest,” but even here there are missed opportunities. Drawing on the argument of Earl Wasserman’s book The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems, Taylor argues that neoclassical poems like Pope’s are designed merely to reflect an existing metaphysical order. But even if a poem like “Windsor-Forest” can be imagined merely to reflect some pre-existing order, the truth of the matter — as The Language Animal shows us — is that its language creates the very order that it seems to reflect. Only by putting the poem into those classic, well measured heroic couplets does Pope pull off the illusion that his language is a mirror held up to nature. Even when language seems “designative,” to use Taylor’s terminology, it is still working in “constitutive” ways. This was an important insight of The Language Animal, but it is one that Cosmic Connections is too quick to forget.
At the same time, when Taylor turns his attention to the Romantic poets and post-Romantic poets who are the heroes of his book, something funny happens. The “designative” view that Taylor sought to banish to the Enlightenment comes back with a vengeance. Even as he seeks to put distance between Pope and the Romantics, Taylor espouses an essentially mimetic approach to poetry in the sense that it is representations of connection that occupy his attention over and against the poetic production of experiences of connection. Lines from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” for example, are cited multiple times throughout the book because their semantic content provides a covert means of understanding poetic effect. Only because Wordsworth represents a feeling of connection, that is, can Taylor make the case that it produces an experience of connection. This would not be a problem if Cosmic Connections were not so avowedly opposed to “designative” uses of language — and if it were not so committed to tracking the experiences that poetry produces by way of form.
As it stands, the book turns out to be surprisingly inattentive to matters of poetic form, and its readings suffer as a result. Turning to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Taylor writes that “it is hard to describe” what happens in the poem, but what it effects is “a fusion of some of the most moving features into a more intense image,” which produces a “single powerful sense of presence, of absorbed enclosure in a peak experience.” There is nothing wrong about a statement like this, but there is nothing necessarily right about it, either. The “experience” in question is asserted, but without any of the fine-grained textual attention that would give this word the meaning it deserves. Taylor acknowledges that the “music of sound and images” is constitutive of the experience he wants to capture — “There is a flow here,” he writes, a “flow in the poetic description” which “matches the flow in the lived experience” — but there is nothing to tell us what distinguishes that music and the “experience” it produces.
The argument of Cosmic Connections is distinctly literary, in the sense that it depends, at heart, on the literary-critical practice of close reading. But close reading is exactly what is missing from much of this book, which skims the surface of the poems it chooses to consider, often resorting to paraphrase in lieu of deeper, more discriminating attention. As a result, the “connections” of its title are mystified. The age-old tendency among academics to turn verbs into nouns leads Taylor to take the “connections” of his book for granted. Simply declaring a “connection” is there takes the place of any subtler treatment of the way these connections get established, and the things they connect together.
In an important recent article in New Literary History, the literary critic Nancy Yousef observes that the subfield known as “philosophy of literature” has thrived on its remarkable disregard for the practice of close reading. For practitioners of this field, literature generally has the value of reproducing experiences otherwise unavailable to us, but at the cost of any meaningful engagement with the language that produces it. For Yousef, this resistance to reading is the symptom of “the atrophying of hermeneutic methods within Anglo-American philosophy more broadly.” One wishes that Cosmic Connections were not another example of the aversion she describes. Still, it would be wrong to blame the book’s shortcomings solely on philosophy. If Cosmic Connections is representative of a discipline that struggles to come to terms with literature, it is also a reflection of a literary criticism which has itself become only too eager to look past the words that make it possible.
Charles Taylor’s Sublime Shortcomings. The great philosopher’s book about poetry is provocative but disappointing. By Matthew Hunter. The Chronicle of Higher Education, May 22, 2024
