Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment [Hardcover]

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 Taylors 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 Taylors 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. Taylors magisterial work takes us from H?lderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarm?, and on to Eliot, MiBosz, 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, poetrys reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too movingtoo obviously trueto be ignored.

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.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 perhapsls—