An unfortunate combination of poetry and philosophy

Charles Taylor is a retired distinguished professor of philosophy. The second paragraph of the preface to his new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the age of disillusionmentoutlines his goal:

(T)he book is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection; by “connection” I mean not just awareness of the surrounding world, but one that is imbued with joy, meaning, and inspiration. My hypothesis is that the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history, but that the forms this desire has taken have been very different in different phases and stages of that history.

He has set himself an ambitious goal and so it is not surprising that his book does not live up to his own ambitions.

Cosmic connections begins with a subject that Taylor is passionate about: the rise of Romanticism in German philosophy (Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) and German poetry (Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Schlegels) in the 1790s. Taylor also discusses major figures who rejected the label “Romanticism,” notably Goethe and Kant.

It does not take long to conclude that this book needs a thorough revision – a task that major commercial and academic publishers unfortunately largely neglect in their scholarly books (the author, who seems to be a gracious man, had no editor to thank in his acknowledgements). For example, pages five and six contain a list of five “themes and concepts” that Taylor believes characterize German Romanticism; but these are masterly statements that have no connection with any previous or subsequent analysis of German poetry. The first poem quoted comes more than ten pages later – and it is Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, not a German poem. There is no quotation from a German poem until page 67, which is a short passage from Goethe, one of the poets Taylor describes as opposed to Romanticism. When the book finally returns to German Romantic poetry on page 97 and engages in immediate discussions of Hölderlin’s The Rhine and The Archipelagus, the author has already moved on to other topics, apparently convinced that he does not need to provide any analysis to support his comprehensive framework of German Romantic poetry.

By this point in the book, Taylor’s language has lost precision; the reader must wade through incomplete sentences (particularly those in which the word “but” is used incorrectly or too often), unclear referents, passive verbs (e.g., “But this is not felt to be an arbitrarily chosen and imposed order, but a unity inherent in reality itself”), and non sequiturs. He tacks appendices onto chapters rather than integrating them into his analyses. Almost none of the discussions of the individual poems substantiate the arguments Taylor makes at the beginning of the book, and he jumps from idea to idea like an overexcited golden retriever puppy.

About a quarter of the way through the book’s 600 pages, it becomes clear that the author has clumsily conflated two books. The first would have dealt with the philosophical content of Romantic poetry and the influence of German philosophy of the time on this poetry. The second book would have been a volume of essays containing all the observations the author wanted to make about Romanticism that did not fit into the first book.

By the time the reader reaches a long chapter incorrectly labelled “The History of Ethical Growth”, it is clear that Taylor also intended to write a third, very different book. After finally arriving at the indisputably true statement that “it should be clear that ethical human growth is not simply linear or additive, with higher stages building on earlier, lower ones”, our Canadian author launches into an ill-informed rant about American politics, in which he mainly Mitt Romney, of all people:

This crash is a catastrophe for several reasons. It is a Catastrophe because it deeply divides, hinders and paralyzes the democratic society that has given us first and secondGreat citizens. But it is also a catastrophe in other respects because it builds on the deprivations imposed on the non-elites by the spread of a Romney-style moralistic worldview among the rich and powerful. In many Western democracies this is brought about a frustration that was resolved by a major downgrade in the living standards of the workers, who feel that The system is against them, they cannot influence it, and that their effectiveness among citizens is practically non-existent. They are ready for a program that liberates the demos or Give the people power again against the elites.

Only the demos have now been re-described – either in a A moralistic, ethnic or historically based approach that excludes many people – and which has the double disadvantage of deeply dividing society and the second disadvantage of not addressing the real problems and challenges of downgrading.

The first paragraph is superficial and irrelevant to the rest of the book. The second paragraph is mired in jargon and incoherence.

Taylor’s intense interest in contemporary politics does not suggest that he is also interested in contemporary poetry. He begins his discussion of 20th-century poets with some competent remarks about TS Eliot, which ignore the expectations raised by his own introductory chapter. He then races through a series of analyses of Eliot’s most important poems, sprinkling in a sentence or so every few lines. His analysis of the work of Czesław Miłosz is even more superficial and rambling.

Despite the great promise implied by the title of the final chapter (“Cosmic Connection Today—And Perennially”), the chapters on Eliot and Miłosz are all Taylor has to say about contemporary poetry. In fact, Eliot or Miłosz are not even mentioned in the final chapter, but time is somehow spent talking about the novelist Annie Dillard for no apparent reason other than that Taylor likes her work and attributes a spiritual dimension to it.

One cannot help but mourn the missed opportunity. The greatest religious poets of the last fifty years – Elizabeth Jennings, Dana Gioia or Christian Wiman, to name a few – are not mentioned. There is no mention of Dylan Thomas, whose use of language to achieve transcendence exhibits many of the qualities Taylor rightly sees in Gerard Manley Hopkins. There is no mention of poets like James Merrill, who reject religion but still strive for the supernatural.

One often gets the impression of Cosmic connections that the masterful generalizations about poetry extend to the poetry of the present day, and that is unfortunate. It is simply not true that the vast majority of contemporary poets relate to the world in the way that the poets discussed in this book do. In fact, today’s MFA-driven literary complex has done an astonishingly efficient job of eradicating religion and spirituality from poetry. These gatekeepers relentlessly direct poets’ attention to the body, a small set of ideological grievances, and the superiority of certain genetic hereditary traits; they reject the craft that Taylor values, and they show little interest in the “joy, meaning (and) inspiration” that he values. Poetry reminiscent of Eliot, Hopkins, or Rilke has great difficulty finding a home these days, but that sad fact does not seem to interest him. Taylor seems to have no response, or even interest, in contemporary poetry’s rejection of the aspirations of Romanticism.

Cosmic connections has temporary charm – it made me want to re-read Hölderin after 35 years. It also made me think more deeply about the worldviews of several other poets. These blessings, however, were not enough to justify the time and effort required to read the book.

Image by Andrzej Solnica and licensed via Adobe Stock.