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 he wrote with his friend Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads (1798). In the poem, Wordsworth’s Enlightenment-oriented friend Matthew gently mocks him for spending all day dreamily sitting on a stone. Why doesn’t he get himself a book and do some real learning! William acts as if he is nature’s first-born child, as if he has a special relationship with the natural world that justifies his indolence.
Undaunted by Matthew’s taunts, William explains what he is doing as he sits upon his rock:
“The eye—it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.
“Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.
“Think you, ‘mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come
But we must still be seeking?” (17-28)
Rather than read a book, William opens himself to the world around him in all its beauty. Our senses were made to commune with nature, and they cannot help but take in her spirit. His desire is not to study or measure or unpack or dissect nature; he asks only to receive her in what he, somewhat paradoxically, calls a wise passiveness.
He may seem lazy to an outside observer cut off from the spirit, beauty, and wonder of nature, but he is working nonetheless. He is actively (“wise”) absorbing (“passiveness”) the Power that flows through nature. Matthew is wrong to think that we can only attain wisdom by a feverish application of reason, logic, and scientific analysis. Revelations from nature do come, but we must be open and ready to receive them.
Although Charles Taylor does not reference this poem in Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, he does a fine job showing how Wordsworth, along with his fellow British, German, and French Romantic poets, used his craft to reclaim a dimension of reality that had been stolen from Europe by the Enlightenment. Taylor, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University (Montreal, Quebec), is best known for his magisterial Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. For many decades, Taylor has worked steadily and faithfully to uncover the roots of modern secularism and to illuminate how the Enlightenment, by moving us from a porous world (in which there is a two-way traffic between physical and metaphysical realities) into a buffered one (where we are protected from supernatural invasion or interference), stranded Europe, and America, in a disenchanted world.
In Cosmic Connections, Taylor extends his analysis of disenchantment into the aesthetic realm of poetry. Rather than repeat his earlier investigations into the causes of secularization, he zeroes in on how a series of German (Hölderlin, Novalis), British (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Hopkins), and French (Rilke, Baudelaire, Mallarmé) poets sought to reconnect with nature and the lost cosmic order through language and imagination. “Nature,” Taylor explains, “was not to be understood mechanistically. It was more like a living organism. In other words, the Romantics were rebelling against a dead, mechanical view of Nature. And they were also rebelling against mind-body dualism, and against a purely instrumental approach to nature” (5).
Although the British Romantics respected the genius of Newton, they feared that the clockwork universe he had initiated had, to borrow a metaphor from Keats’s Lamia, unwoven the rainbow, explaining away its beauty and mystery as light refracted through raindrops. The Romantic movement, which began in Germany and then moved to England and France, hungered to return to a world where there was a sympathy, a fittedness, between nature (the object) and the mind of man (the subject), so much so that the same living force flowed through and animated both.
They sought as well to reclaim a language where words were not abstractions but real, concrete things. Through this “primal language of Adam,” the language by which he named the animals (Genesis 2:19), words would no longer be “arbitrarily applied to what they designate but would be somehow uniquely right or appropriate to the things they named” (9). Rather than accept the reduction of words to instrumental tools, they fought to restore through poetry an incarnational language where the relationship between word and meaning is, to borrow an analogy from Wordsworth’s “Essays Upon Epitaphs,” like that between body and soul, not clothes and body.
Which is not to say they desired to skip over the Enlightenment and reestablish the Renaissance. Taylor does an effective job defending the Romantics from the charge of being “irrationalist reactionaries.” Their goal was not “to restore the status quo ante the Enlightenment…. Their appropriation of Renaissance theories didn’t involve a simple return, but a reappropriation with a difference” (13). They would re-enchant the world through the power of their poetry, a poetry that would replace the one-to-one correspondence of medieval allegory and the fixed hierarchies of the Renaissance Chain of Being with richer, stranger, more vibrant symbols that tear back the veil to reveal deeper mysteries. Their poetry does more than teach us; it provides us with an experience that triggers in us what Taylor, in his inimitable way, terms “a revealing-connecting-empowering epiphany” (40).
Romantic poetry at its highest effects a marriage between mind and nature that opens a door onto what Taylor calls “the interspace, the space of interaction between us and our world” (58). Taylor quotes often Wordsworth’s discovery in nature of “something far more deeply interfused” (“Tintern Abbey,” verse 96), using it as an example of how Romantic poets point us toward that indefinable something that runs through the interstices (“interspaces”) that connect object and subject, natural and spiritual, physical and metaphysical.
At one point, Taylor uses the verse to clarify a unique aspect of Romantic poetry: “Wordsworth must have held that something in the nature of things lay behind this sense of a force running through all things. Without offering a theory, he assumes that certain things are true of the cosmos. But the work of art—in this it is analogous to a ritual—produces an effect, and it does so in the here and now” (65). Poets like Wordsworth do not offer a logical philosophical theory or an empirical scientific observation. Rather, they accept intuitively that the cosmos is meaningful and relational and then invite us to participate in that meaning, not in some abstract realm of ideas, but in the concrete here and now.
Beginning in Germany in the 1790s, Taylor explains, Romantics used the medium of poetry to move Europe from “a dead, instrumental” language to “a living, disclosive, epiphanic one” (95). Only such a language could help restore moderns to “a condition of harmony and resonance with Nature” (95): not by returning to pre-Enlightenment unity, but by reaching after a higher unity. Taylor does not reference Owen Barfield—the author of Poetic Diction, Saving the Appearances and What Coleridge Thought and a friend of and fellow Inkling with C. S. Lewis—but he makes essentially the same argument. The Romantics could not return Europe to what Barfield calls “original participation” with nature; instead, they pressed on toward “final participation,” partly by way of a newly baptized poetic language that would allow moderns to commune with nature on a deeper, conscious level that does not shy away from pain or sorrow.
Taylor finds Barfield’s final participation in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a British Victorian poet and Jesuit priest who is better categorized as a post-Romantic. Taylor correctly identifies Hopkins as “an orthodox Christian, a Catholic” (165), a faith that allowed the poet-priest to rest his Romantic project on an ancient-medieval philosophy—realism, as opposed to nominalism—rather than fashion a new one, as most of the other Romantic poets Taylor highlights did. Still, even for the devout Hopkins, a simple return to the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas was not enough.
In “The Windhover,” Hopkins celebrates and connects with the at-once general and specific nature of his eponymous bird, “not through scholastic argument [Thomistic realism] but through a poem which makes us feel the inscape of the bird, respond to its constitutive inner rhythm. We are reconnecting with a medieval doctrine, with ancient roots, via a felt connection, that the poetry brings about in us” (165). Hopkins himself coined the word “inscape,” a word that Taylor defines as “the inner force which shapes a given particular being” (163) and which bears close resemblance to Taylor’s interspace. Hopkins is only able to reach the inscape of the bird, and to help his reader to do so as well, by yoking the realist philosophy of Plato/Aquinas—which assures him that the bird points beyond itself to an eternal Form or Idea or Essence—with the power of his poetic language—which enables that Essence to be accessible to mortals.
Taylor locates a similar juxtaposition of essential Form and particular object in the closing stanza of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats did not share Hopkins’s Christian faith, but he did retain a realist view of Ideas/Forms. Thus, when Keats proclaims that, at least in the aesthetic life of the urn, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” he means it to be “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” (144). Keats experiences that Beauty and Truth, and he makes his readers experience it as well, but that does not make the experience solely subjective. There is a real place, an interspace, where mortal and immortal Beauty and Truth can commune.
As an added treat, Taylor carries his analysis into the twentieth century to consider the poetic and spiritual progression of T. S. Eliot. The pre-Christian Eliot who wrote The Waste Land attempted “to invoke and thus reconnect with a cosmic order occluded through disenchantment” (503), but he proved unable to do so. Only after he embraced an Anglo-Catholic faith not all that different from Hopkins’s was he able, like Hopkins, to use “the means that contemporary poetry had created to give us a new angle of approach to a long-standing doctrine” (507). In Four Quartets, Eliot conjures a series of suspended moments when “[a]longside our ordinary lived time, we feel another, fuller presence is sharing this moment with us” (509). All represent “epiphanic moments when something like higher time breaks through” (513). Revelation and connection come through each epiphany, opening wide the interspace and inviting us to enter in.
In this review, I have confined myself to the English and American poets whom Taylor studies. That is because I repeatedly lost the flow of argument when he turned his focus to Hölderlin, Novalis, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé. I’m afraid that in Cosmic Connections Taylor falls prey to a weakness I have spent my career trying to weed out of my English majors. That weakness involves stating a thematic proposition, illustrating that proposition by means of a long quote from a poem, and then moving on, without clearly explaining, analyzing, and clarifying the quoted passage. Too often, Taylor leaves the extended passages from his German and French poets to speak for themselves. To be honest, he does the same with the English-speaking poets, but my intimate knowledge of those poets allowed me to fill in the gaps missing in the analysis.
Still, with that caveat, I believe Cosmic Connections is an important book that offers hope that we can fight the war against disenchantment on many fronts. Those weary of living in a buffered world devoid of magic, wonder, and mystical connection will be happy to find in the Romantic poets of Germany, England, and France an antidote for melancholy and a method for resistance.
Louis Markos is Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Christian University and holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 26 books include The Eye of the Beholder: How to See the World like a Romantic Poet, Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age, Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis, The Myth Made Fact, and Literature: A Student’s Guide.