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Cosmic Connections

Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2024

About this book

A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year

A major new work by Charles Taylor: the long-awaited follow-up to The Language Animal, exploring the Romantic poetics central to his theory of language.

The Language Animal, Charles Taylor’s 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was more to be said. Cosmic Connections extends Taylor’s exploration of innovations in language by turning to Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment.

The fall of cosmic order left Romantics groping toward a new meaning of life. They turned to the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence, developing aesthetic forms that post-Romantics have carried into the present day. Taylor takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Miłosz, and beyond.

In seeking understanding and a new 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. 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.

Reviews

A wonderful demonstration of the power of literature to make us think and feel.
-- Adam Kirsch New York Review of Books

An immensely ambitious book…an extraordinarily original, ambitious, and erudite effort to excavate the roots of Romanticism and place it in a new and vital relation with the rest of Western (and not solely Western) culture…a cosmic achievement.
-- George Scialabba Commonweal

Ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, [this book] is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them.
-- Adam Gopnik New Yorker

Offers us something more complicated and interesting than just spreading the good news about poems… [Taylor’s] accounts of the poems are informed and lucid, at times disarming in their personal investment…the commentary has all the expository command of Taylor at his best.
-- Seamus Perry Times Literary Supplement

Monumental…the whole work is nothing if not tantalizing. On page after page are telling phrases and casually dropped insights, reminding us of Taylor’s intellection freshness and penetration…a book of spacious horizons, deep insight, [and] characteristically generous engagement.
-- Rowan Williams First Things

A grand statement of his lifelong conviction that words are not counters for the exchange of information but are valuable only when they express and shape what we mean and what we value. They should connect us to one another, if not perhaps to the cosmos. Cosmic Connections appears just as gloom is mounting about the commercialized automation of writing, the degradation of political language, and the disintegration of social cohesion. It invites us to consider these pressing evils as connected and to resist them by drawing upon literature to refresh our own speech.
-- Michael Ledger-Lomas Literary Review of Canada

There is something enthralling as well as endearing about this late work. Taylor’s passionate admiration for and responsiveness to his chosen poets, and his sense of the profound importance of the issues they confront, come through essentially undiminished.
-- Stephen Mulhall London Review of Books

Taylor is a perceptive reader of his poets, and he offers a wonderful synthesis of how poets from the Romantics onward have sought to overcome the ‘disenchanted’ vision of reality…he calls our attention to a way of understanding the Romantic age that makes it appear lively, salient, and worthy of the reader’s contemplation.
-- James Matthew Wilson National Review

To meet the demands of our violently fragmented political moment, Taylor gives a compelling case for the need for a deep, unprecedented reconciliation as a necessary condition for solidarity…These are the high stakes of Taylor’s account of poetry; the insights of ethical discernment must come in part from how we truthfully articulate who we are in the world.
-- Sarah V. Schweig Public Seminar

Taylor shows how…poetry…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…[this book] dares to treat poetic language as a unique category of communication unto itself that is as distinct as it is elusive to the understanding.
-- Matthew Hunter Chronicle of Higher Education

[Taylor’s] working theory seems to be that he has found in the poetics of cosmic connection a deep sense of significance, and he wants for us to find it too. Despite the different underlying stories, the endlessly diverging and never resolving meanings and symbols and significations, he finds that poetry still calls to him, still makes claims on him that are definite in their effect if not in their propositional content. Why should that be the case, for him or for anyone else? What is it that keeps drawing us back to these wells? This book is his answer.
-- Jeff Reimer The Bulwark

A return to form for Taylor…a worthy milestone in an extraordinary career.
-- Stevan Veljkovic European Journal of Social Theory

At once a meticulously precise examination of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and, more ambitiously, an urgent call for what we might refer to as ‘poetic realism.’
-- Tara Isabella Burton The Dispatch

[This] transcontinental exploration of the Romantic poetic tradition from William Wordsworth
to Annie Dillard…responds to what we may call our ‘postliberal’ moment. Given the broad social alienation, collapse of shared epistemologies, and spread of antidemocratic sentiments across the globe, it is not the independence and creative groundlessness of the Romantics that Taylor calls upon here, but their linguistic representation of attachment across space and time.


-- Jamison Kantor Critical Inquiry

Demonstrates awe-inspiring range and a fundamental belief in the power of art…a broad-ranging, occasionally startling, and often moving book…beautifully argued [and] lovingly rendered.
-- Mischa Willett Gospel Coalition

A masterpiece that sheds light on why a poet such as Kurt Cobain speaks to us even when he sings cryptic lyrics, why the environmentalist movement expresses a kind of spirituality, and why analytic
philosophers should read Continental philosophy and Romantic poetry.


-- Nicholas Tampio Review of Politics

A labor of love…a worthy swan song.
-- Matt McManus Christian Socialism

No one has this sort of range, erudition, and lucidity…[Taylor] is certainly the leading Catholic philosopher in the world.
-- Robert B. Pippin Mind

Attempts to provide a corrective to the boring and lifeless secularism that has suffocated modernity.
-- Jesse Russell Cracks in Postmodernity

Taylor sympathetically enters into the grief and anguish, the joys and hopes of modern humanity. He is a philosopher of remarkable erudition, but his philosophical brilliance is, fundamentally, an act of service to fellow humans. Taylor is a thinker with heart. His rigorous philosophical analysis is, in the end, existential: He wants to help us understand ourselves. He wants to help us articulate our longings and losses. He wants to hear, even in our grief and anguish, a still small whisper that calls us to something more. He wants us to find fulfillment.
-- James K. A. Smith America

Topics

  • Publicly Available

    Frontmatter

    i
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  • Publicly Available

    CONTENTS

    vii
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  • Publicly Available

    PREFACE

    ix
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  • PART I
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    Chapter One “TRANSLATION” AND THE “SUBTLER LANGUAGES”

    3
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    Chapter Two EPISTEMIC ISSUES

    48
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    Chapter Three AN EPOCHAL CHANGE

    85
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  • PART II
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    Chapter Four HÖLDERLIN, NOVALIS

    95
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    Chapter Five NATURE, HISTORY

    125
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    Chapter Six SHELLEY, KEATS (AFTER WORDSWORTH)

    140
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  • PART III
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    Chapter Seven HOPKINS, INSCAPE AND AFTER

    163
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    Chapter Eight RILKE

    191
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    Chapter Nine EPISTEMIC RETREAT AND THE NEW CENTRALITY OF TIME

    252
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  • PART IV
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    Chapter Ten BAUDELAIRE

    267
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    Chapter Eleven AFTER BAUDELAIRE

    362
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    Chapter Twelve MALLARMÉ

    387
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  • PART V THE MODERNIST TURN
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    Chapter Thirteen T. S. ELIOT

    485
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    Chapter Fourteen MIŁOSZ

    530
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  • PART VI RELATION TO HISTORY AND THE PRESENT
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    Chapter Fifteen HISTORY OF ETHICAL GROWTH

    553
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    Chapter Sixteen COSMIC CONNECTION TODAY—AND PERENNIALLY

    588
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    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    601
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    CREDITS

    603
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    INDEX

    605
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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
May 21, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9780674297074
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674297074
eBook ISBN: 9780674297074
Keywords for this book
german writers; thinkers; kant; goethe; schiller; renaissance; modernism; johann georg hamann; theology; epistemology; subjectivity; epiphany; mythology; transposition; waste land; four quartets; identity; axial period; ethics; enlightenment
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