Charles Taylor, “Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment” (Harvard University Press 2024)
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 finds 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? 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.
