by Mischa Willett
In Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot called poetry “a raid on the inarticulate.” I’ve always liked the phrase. It implies the chaotic mess of life in a postlapsarian world is mimicked in language’s fragmentary nature. It also implies poets can do something about it, diving into the deep as they find treasure and nourishment. Having found them, they can offer them for our benefit. There’s something clandestine about the whole operation—a raid—reminiscent of the Promethean theft of fire.
If Eliot is right, and if the metaphor holds, we have a record of the greatest of such attempts in Charles Taylor’s new book Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. What gold has surfaced? What nourishment is on offer? And how do we reconcile any of this with the God who is himself the Word, the logic, the order underlying everything?
Taylor phrases it like this: “Romantic art as a response to the loss of cosmic order begets the aspiration to reconnect” (89). People feel a loss of connection in many dimensions: between one another, between themselves and nature, between themselves and the past. They feel, at least some of them, that poetry is a vehicle for mending that disconnect.
Taylor’s animating question in this new volume is how this reconnection happens. Why does reading another human’s artful language momentarily alleviate the dislocation from reality many modern people feel?
Experience Poetry
Taylor diagnoses the modern condition: “We need a relation to the word, the universe, to things, forests, fields, mountains, seas, analogous to that we have to human beings we love and works of art; where we feel ourselves addressed, and called upon to answer” (130). Oh, how we experience this dislocation. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it! We’re relational by design and cry out like the very stones when estranged from our natures.
His answer is that the experience of poetry—not simply to read it but “to let oneself be carried by it”—is to “experience a strong sense of connection” and that to feel the connection “is to strengthen it, to enter into it more fully” (18). Taylor briefly references music and painting but argues across 600 pages for poetry’s ability to engender such connections.
Perhaps poetry creates a sense of connection because it asks so much of us. We aren’t passive receptors of poetry. We don’t watch it. Poetry doesn’t happen to us. Rather, readers enter into communion with another mind and collaborate to produce whatever meaning it can carry. That gives us both the dignity of work—sweat of our brow, fruit of our labor—and the sense of being addressed, of being trusted, that Taylor describes.
Poetry's Power
In Taylor’s schema, the way this connection is forged changes from poet to poet. For some poets, the connectedness of all things means poetry reveals a verifiable reality inherent in the universe. Readers of A Secular Age will recognize this as a transition beyond “the immanent frame,” though he doesn’t use that language here. As 19th-century poet Percy Shelley described it, “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, / Stains the white radiance of Eternity.” That is, eternity is white radiance, but we, creatures bound (for the moment) in time, perceive it as fragmentary and distorted. Or as Paul wrote, “Now we see through a glass, darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12, KJV).
For later poets, however, the task isn’t to reveal cosmic truth but to produce an effect. Taylor writes,
In the era where the traditional cosmic orders reigned unchallenged, the important intellectual achievement consisted in our grasping a vision of hierarchical order, which in turn inspired us to embrace certain ultimate values; but, in the Romantic period, the important goal was to gain a sense of connection which was life-enhancing . . . a connection which was “resonant.” (129)
Along the way, Taylor puts to bed some misconceptions about poetry. For instance, he claims that “Romanticism was not the source of the dissociation of the three transcendentals” that many take it to have been. We cannot lay the loss of the true, good, and beautiful at the feet of the Romantics.
For those tempted to diminish poetry’s power with accusations of navel-gazing, Taylor insists “giving vent to one’s personality is emphatically not the goal” (504). And he admonishes those who simply throw up their hands, saying they’re just not into poetry: “Not responding [to poetry] in this way is missing something important in the range of potentialities for a full life” (54). Taste. See.
Discerning the Audience
The book demonstrates awe-inspiring range and a fundamental belief in the power of art. Most philosophers are quick to pull everything down to first principles, to get at the “it” at the center of whatever question they’ve posed. For the most part, Taylor does this as well. Like some incarnate large-language model, he categorizes huge swaths of verse across centuries and languages to ask who dares to fly. Yet he never seems to doubt that people are capable of flight on the wings of poetry.
Cosmic Connections is a broad-ranging, occasionally startling, and often moving book, yet it’s hard to know the target audience. It’s full of one-name references to thinkers with whom readers are presumably meant to be familiar. “So Proust,” is an entire sentence, referencing the French novelist’s enormous output and influence. Perhaps then it’s meant for literary specialists and other ubercultured sorts? But the readings of Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and even Hopkins in the book examine only the most well-known poems such as one would find in a freshman literature anthology. Most are familiar, well-trodden paths for anyone in academia. So maybe it isn’t a book for scholars.
Taylor seems to be after the sort of readers who (1) believe in poetry’s power, (2) are familiar enough with intellectual history to be on a first-name or even nickname basis with its trends (e.g., “Jena,” the name of a German town, carries huge significance for a small number of people trained in theories of the symbolic), and (3) read fluently in three or four languages (all poetic and philosophical quotations are rendered in the original languages first, rather than placed in footnotes) but (4) are unaware of the secondary literature on the major British Romantics (so, not professors or scholars). That’s a small area of the Venn diagram.
Many threads and themes are picked up and unceremoniously dropped. Many outlines are furnished but not followed. For instance, the introduction promises to discuss British Romanticism, but fully half the book is dedicated to French surrealists and German philosophers. It then covers moderns like Eliot, Miłosz, and Rilke, with only a scant handful of pages on Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, the major British Romantics.
What the book lacks in literary analysis, it makes up for in novel descriptions of the real. Fans of Taylor’s previous books will be on solid, familiar footing with observations such as this: “We normally live in a mental/emotional frame which is narrowly centered on us . . . but we can occasionally reach/leap beyond this, and live, really live, in a much bigger space; that is, feel this as our primary locus” (185).
That’s not only profoundly true but beautifully argued, lovingly rendered, and as such—as much of this adventurous new tome does—it aspires to the condition of poetry. This may not be Taylor’s best book, but if only for its capacious range, it’s one worth appreciating.
Originally published on The Gospel Coalition
Mischa Willett (Ph.D.) is author of two books of poetry, including The Elegy Beta (2020) and Phases (2017) as well as of essays, translations, and reviews that appear in both popular and academic journals. A specialist in nineteenth-century aesthetics, he teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.