The passage from Enlightenment to Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century was perhaps the most deeply felt crisis in European intellectual history. The Age of Reason had seen such extraordinary strides in scientific discovery and political liberty that the future progress of both mind and society seemed to many already marked out. Two groups of people were unhappy about this. Traditionalists, both religious and political, regarded the party of Reason as a nuisance, to be swatted away rather than argued with in earnest. The Enlightenment’s scientific materialism and anti-authoritarianism seemed to them sheer perversity, old heresies in a new garb. But by the time the party of Reason morphed into the party of Revolution, it was too late for swatting; and by the mid-nineteenth century the traditionalists had retreated into a long defensive crouch that lasted until quite recently.
The Romantics’ quarrel with the Enlightenment was more intimate and impassioned. The Romantics embraced Enlightenment rationalism, as far as it went, but protested that it left many important questions unanswered. “Is that all?” the nineteenth century rebuked the eighteenth. “How does your Reason account for Spirit, Beauty, Community, Art? Why are Intuition and Imagination not equally valid sources of truth?” The Enlightenment delighted in the universal, in showing what was true of all human beings in all times and places. Romantics thought the most interesting truths about humans were local and particular, accessible only to those with a deep knowledge of a people’s history and culture. The Enlightenment aspired to system: to theories that were logically consistent and complete. The Romantics thought that uniqueness, incompleteness, and idiosyncrasy were more dependable guides to truth. The Enlightenment thought that Reason was autonomous, a disinterested power of reflection, capable of judging objectively and impartially. The Romantics asked why Reason alone should be immune from distorting material influences like instinct, desire, and custom. The Enlightenment prized transparency, dreaming of a language free of ambiguity. The Romantics insisted that languages are organic, polyvalent, and opaque. The Enlightenment exalted individual rights, self-interest, and negative freedoms. The Romantics countered that our identities are social before they are individual and that rational self-interest is by no means our most important motive.
Naturally, these differences played out over many realms: politics, philosophy, science, art. One of the most fruitful fields of Romantic innovation was the theory and practice of poetry. The classical and neoclassical poet was a craftsman: he tried to limit ambiguity, strangeness, and excess; to make sure metaphors and other imagery were intelligible and consistent; to avoid drawing too frequent attention to himself; and to master the disciplines of meter, rhyme, and diction. “Invention”—cleverness or ingenuity—was praised, but originality must be limited; the poet was not expected to break the mold of poetic tradition. Of course emotion was not prohibited; poetry can hardly be written without it. But balance, measure, and control were the fundamental premises, the characteristic notes, of pre-Romantic poetry.
Romanticism drastically reconceived the role of the poet. In parallel with the revolution in German philosophy at the time, the Romantics theorized that the mind of the poet was not merely a passive receptor of sense impressions but was something alive, growing, and highly individuated. The poet’s mind shaped its own perceptions in something like the way the German Idealists claimed that Mind partly originated sense impressions and ideas. The poet—or painter or composer—was no longer a craftsman but was now a creator. The hint of divinity in that term contributed to the mystique that frequently surrounded Romantic artists, while the critical ascription of “inwardness” and “depth” to their art lent them a new prestige.
Whenever in his long career he has encountered a momentous cultural-historical change, Charles Taylor’s characteristic response has been to write a monumental book. About the emergence of the modern self from the ascriptive premodern self, which was defined by privileges, duties, and one’s place in the order of being, he wrote Sources of the Self (1989). About the multifaceted evolution from an epoch of belief to an epoch of unbelief, he wrote the massive A Secular Age (2007). His new book, Cosmic Connections, develops at great length one of the themes of A Secular Age, the Romantic reaction against the Enlightenment, especially as embodied in the very rich corpus of German and English Romantic poetry.
Cosmic Connections is an immensely ambitious book, like its distinguished predecessors. It is also, like them, immensely difficult, perhaps unavoidably so—though perhaps not. Taylor writes in a loose, discursive, allusive, almost absent-minded style. An uncharitable reviewer might describe it as wordy, woolly, and wandering. It would, admittedly, require a superhuman degree of literary skill to render a searching discussion of such subtle and profound matters consistently intelligible, and Taylor is only human. But while I have often found it difficult to follow Taylor, I have never doubted it was worth trying. His philosophical antithesis, Richard Rorty, wrote of Taylor: “He is attempting nothing less than a synthesis of moral reflection and intellectual history, one which will do for our time what Hegel did for his.”
A critic of poetry need not have a philosophy of language, but a theorist of poetry probably does. Amplifying ideas he broached in The Language Animal (2016), Taylor distinguishes “designative-instrumental” from “expressive-constitutive” language. The former is the default, everyday version, mapping signs straightforwardly onto meanings. But new experiences strain the adequacy of our maps; we need new, constitutive language to fully articulate new meanings. Part of Taylor’s purpose in Cosmic Connections is to rescue the indefinable (or, at any rate, undefined) terms that many Romantic poets gave to their crucial experiences—Wordsworth’s “spirit,” Hölderlin’s “gods,” Rilke’s “angels”—from condescension or dismissal by skeptical materialists.
When we shuffled off our premodern superstitions—e.g., that animals have souls, that certain sacred spaces emanate power, that the cosmos is a Great Chain of Being—rationalists overlooked the possibility that our ancestors were not deluded but only inarticulate. The Romantics did not. They also experienced disenchantment, but unlike skeptical rationalists, could not rest in it. “Romantic art as a response to the loss of cosmic orders begets the aspiration to reconnect,” Taylor writes. The Romantics looked to perennial human intuitions and instincts for hints about meta-physical (though not necessarily metaphysical) ethical and psychological meanings, a “deeper order of things,” with which poetry could help them reconnect.
Cosmic Connections opens a new front in Taylor’s long war against reductionism. Our responses to art are not objective, but neither are they mere “varieties of subjective feeling.” Romantic art “convinces us through moving us.” Its “epiphanic invocations of order are like flashes of insight, which are incomplete and, in the nature of things, ultimately uncompletable.” Although “they can never enjoy the status of firm, indubitable truths,” they are “facts of experience, which cannot be simply ignored.” It sounds as much like religious experience as aesthetic experience. In fact, the influential modernist poet and critic T. E. Hulme disparagingly referred to Romanticism as “spilt religion.” That is what Taylor admires about it. Immemorial understandings of the cosmos had, it seemed, been irretrievably shattered. The Romantics felt this far too deeply to ignore or shrug off; they had to grope for cosmic connections. As a result, “their poetry offers the experience of order without claiming the confirmation of its truth that an underlying story (theistic or other) would give it.”
Taylor applies this model of poetry—as an ardent but inevitably partial and unconsummated reconnection with Nature or with lost wisdom—to a remarkable range of Romantic and post-Romantic poets: Hölderlin, Novalis, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rilke, Eliot, and Miłosz. Some of his readings are more convincing than others. In discussing Goethe’s famous “Wanderers Nachtlied,” he brings out the echoing resonances of the poem’s key word, Ruh (peace). He returns often to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” finding in its climactic lines (“A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of thought, / And rolls through all things”) a poignant attempt to articulate an intuition, or hope, that Nature is alive and harbors a “spirit.” But he is no more successful than his innumerable predecessors in explaining Keats’s “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’” The famous couplet, he insists, “was much more than a throwaway flourish. 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.” Or maybe it was just a throwaway flourish.
Taylor has obviously been deeply moved by the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and his chapter on Hopkins is, in consequence, the most satisfying in the book. Commenting on “The Windhover,” he makes one of his clearest and most penetrating claims about the noetic stance of post-Romantic poetry:
Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable.… Articulating the inscape of the windhover is not capturing a “takeaway” message. It is articulating the way the rhythm of that being resonates in us.
Taylor claims to find “an interesting relationship between the notion of ‘inscape’…and the development of Rilke’s poetry,” but he doesn’t really demonstrate any convincing continuities between these two very different poets, one of them exuberant, even ecstatic, the other profoundly elusive. The long chapters on Baudelaire and Mallarmé are richly informative, though only tenuous connections are made with the book’s earlier themes of cosmic connection and epistemic retreat. Taylor argues that T. S. Eliot’s poetry, in particular The Waste Land, “abandoned…post-Romantic attempts to invoke and thus reconnect with a cosmic order occluded through disenchantment.” Though Eliot was religious, the connection he sought and advocated in his poetry and criticism was not with cosmic order but with Tradition, the presence of the past within the present, or in his celebrated formulation: “A feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
A chapter on Miłosz finds some of the same ontological and epistemological preoccupations as in previous subjects but is more concerned with history and politics, above all with the defense of spirit against the threats and seductions of an aggressively godless world. Simone Weil, a favorite of Miłosz (and Taylor), is invoked frequently. “The vision of history,” Taylor writes, “has to be shot through with a sense of the spiritual being who must live in it.… The daring idea that Miłosz puts forward is that a poet can do that.… This would mean articulating a powerful and inspiring intuition—here about a possible way forward—by sensing and then rendering its thrust and rhythm.” A poetic means to a political—though not merely political—end.
The book’s last two chapters ask what all the preceding speculations and analyses have to say about “history and the present.” How do they contribute to our ethical growth? They teach us, Taylor answers, to look for dialectical rather than linear moral progress, made up of victories reversed and defeats redeemed. This is the “spiral path” proposed by Hegel and other idealist philosophers, which Taylor adumbrates earlier in the book. But otherwise, these two chapters feel a little tacked-on. Taylor’s politics are humane and wise, but unfortunately, like many philosophers, he feels the need to give them a philosophical grounding.
“Clearly,” he writes, “to understand this ethical growth we have to suppose an Aristotle-type theory of the human Form, a set of innate goals which demand fulfillment.” It’s regrettable that Taylor should invoke that most archaic of philosophical notions: the human telos. According to Aristotle, there is one human telos, corresponding to invariant human nature. There is not a contingent, or individual, telos for each human being. Individuals do not choose their telos, or purpose; they learn it from their elders. Now, while it is certainly true that, like every other animal, humans have “innate goals” (though not always the same goals, since our genetic endowments vary), these come from millions of years of biological and social evolution, not from an ahistorical metaphysical Form. And they are only predispositions, strong or weak, which socialization may override. Our purposes do not—cannot—preexist us; we choose them, after deliberation and painful experience. The same is true of societies.
Sadly, Taylor cannot resist the all-too-common temptation to blame the Enlightenment for an alleged “tendency to overreach and to limit and even repress human freedom,” which “reaches its apogee in Bolshevik Leninism, in a disordered paroxysm of ‘liquidation’ under Stalin and Mao, and a horrifying invasive systematicity under Xi.” The idea that Voltaire, Diderot, Paine, Priestley, and Hume are forerunners of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Xi Jinping, though extremely far-fetched, dies hard.
Nevertheless, nine-tenths of Cosmic Connections is 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. Taken together with Sources of the Self, A Secular Age, and The Language Animal, it’s a cosmic achievement.
Cosmic Connections
Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
Charles Taylor
Belknap Press
$37.95 | 640 pp.
This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.
