Cosmic Connections: A Review
Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment by Charles Taylor. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press. 2024. 640 pp. Hardcover. $37.95 Although British Romanticism was born out of the crucible of the French Revolution, it also represents the first great protest movement against one of the major causes of the Revolution, the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment privileged reason over imagination, analysis over synthesis, logic over intuition, the active over the passive, the scientific over the mystical, the physical over the metaphysical, the city over the country, urban sophistication over rustic simplicity. Romantic poets William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats all sought in their work to reverse those counters and to reconnect themselves to the unseen spirit that runs through man and nature. This reversal and reconnection are made evident in Wordsworth’s “Expostulation and Reply,” a poem he included in the collection of poems...
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