Waxing Poetic

The title of the philosopher Charles Taylor’s previous big book, from 2016, defined humans as The Language Animal. Like many of his grand assertions, the phrase works best as a description of himself. As a McGill graduate in mid-’50s Europe, Taylor first encountered Johann Gottfried Herder’s arguments that a language is not just a means of communication but a question of existential significance. The German philosopher’s protests against the tyranny of French over his enlightened contemporaries ironically inspired Taylor’s lifelong sympathy with the francophone nationalism of his native Quebec. It also led him to a keynote of his philosophy: we all need, “in the broadest sense, a language in which to ask and answer the questions of ultimate significance.” Cosmic Connections may be the nonagenarian Taylor’s last word on this subject: an elephantine, under-edited, but often brilliant attempt to explain how the Romantic and post-Romantic poets, whose work he loves, framed these questions in their time and how they can help us to pursue our own answers today.

The book’s exalted sense of what poetry can do is an outgrowth of Taylor’s faith in the grandeur of words. Cosmic Connections is a companion volume to The Language Animal, the most concerted of his attempts to reverse our persistent depreciation of human language. That work argues that early modern philosophers misled us into thinking that the origins of language lie in description: that we coin words to denote what is already in the world or the ideas we have about it. They said we can judge the rightness of language in a side-by-side way: by lining up words next to things to see how they correspond. Such a philosophy is discouraging for poetry, because it dismisses metaphor and symbolism as false or mischievous. It also supports what Taylor has always regarded as the baleful project of scientific naturalism, which is so intent on generating a neutral account of the world that it forgets to ask what it means.

Taylor, by contrast, follows Herder and other German Romantic theorists in maintaining that words do more than encode what is out there: they issue from our attempts to grasp the world and transform how we interact with it. Descriptive theories also fail to explain the acquisition of language; lone individuals do not coin words to capture the evidence of their senses. As children, we learn to speak in “communion” with our caregivers, constantly expanding our powers of articulation in conversation, and our “struggle for articulacy” with others never ends. As Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote, we are always striving to expand the realm of what is sayable. We do so through narrative — by telling stories about ourselves that make innovative use of symbols, metaphors, and even gestures.

To define language as expressive and even constitutive of meaning is to invest it with therapeutic power. As long ago as The Pattern of Politics, from 1970, Taylor diagnosed an “atrophy of meaning” in modern life. He found that his fellow Canadians yearned for “some really significant larger life, something that can command their respect and allegiance,” but came up short. The uglification of cities, the routinization of work, and the waning of the sacred all ensured that they could not “make contact with a significant reality of this kind.” Charlatans filled the void. Canadians regarded Pierre Elliott Trudeau, their youngish prime minister, as a “Rain King” whose charged but hollow antics could magically close the social, regional, and linguistic rifts of their society.

Taylor’s discussion of Trudeaumania was especially withering because Trudeau had beaten him in the Montreal riding of Mount Royal during the 1965 federal election. While Taylor continued to hope that his New Democrats might take on American corporate interests in Canada, he soon shifted his political focus from the implementation of socialism to bigger, essentially semantic questions of meaning. His insistence that Canada could survive only if it recognized Quebec as a distinct society with the power to enforce the use of French by its citizens was a response to the fudges of federalism. Yet it also prompted him to hope that Canada could pioneer the pursuit of “deep diversity.” Quebecers already ruled themselves, more or less. What they wanted was symbolic recognition of their nationhood. The “procedural liberalism” that ruled the West, and which Trudeau would roll out in Canada, could not accommodate this demand, because it defined a polity as a mosaic of individuals. Taylor called instead for a substantive liberalism that would allow groups to express their sense of linguistic, ethnic, or religious difference from the majority. Language could not only effect social peace but also plug the spiritual voids in modern society.

Cosmic Connections is also something of a sequel to A Secular Age, a mammoth treatise from 2007 that establishes secularization as an undeniable, irreversible, but uneven contemporary force. God is not dead, yet religious belief has become just one existential option in our world. The irony is that believers themselves are responsible for its destabilization. Their pious search for understanding has led them to create an “immanent frame”: a vision of the universe as a closed system of causes and effects that can be mapped by natural science. The demand of post-Reformation Christianity that we be true to our consciences has generated a new emphasis on authenticity. People have become “buffered” selves who derive the meaning of their lives from their own desires, rather than from realities outside themselves.

Romantic and post-Romantic poetry are presented in Cosmic Connections as a vital riposte to this disenchanted world. The poets it discusses were painfully conscious of the “epistemic retreat” that made it impossible to follow their predecessors in describing humanity’s place within the invisible order of the universe. At best, they could offer “epiphanies,” flashes of connection with otherwise inaccessible realities. Their works induce a state of “ontic indeterminacy” in which truths can merely be evoked, rather than described. People were once moved by poets who shared their belief in a transcendent realm; now they believe in that realm when they are moved. The works of Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, and John Keats are not just analgesics for the loss of faith, however. Hölderlin wrote of how history followed a “spiral path,” in which the pursuit of freedom first alienates minds from the natural world but then returns them to it and helps them to see in it the source of their deepest aspirations.

To conjure up this resonance between mind and nature requires a new “semantics of aspiration.” Taylor explains how Romantic poets pushed to their limits the metaphoric and expressive powers of language upon which Herder had insisted. It is easier to say what poetry does than to demonstrate how it works. Taylor does so by printing big chunks of verse with his meditative commentaries on them. He hovers insistently over charged passages in which the music of speech brings us to feel from within what he thinks scientific language can only study from without, as when Gerard Manley Hopkins writes that “my heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!” or finds that every living creature “deals out that being indoors each one dwells; / Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells.” Taylor switches up these compelling but punishing sessions in the seminar room with visionary lectures on the changes in the modern condition to which his writers were responding.

This approach makes for a distended but also equivocal book. Taylor’s critics have often alleged that he cannot decide whether his philosophy aims at a “perennial” analysis of what human beings are or just a historical account of how some societies — namely ours — evolved. Is the craving for connection that his poets voiced a “constant” in how “we”— all of us — feel or a growing pain of Western societies? Taylor mainly wants it to be the former. He represents people today in gloomy (and faintly Canadian) terms as lost souls. We yearn to walk in forests and feel “anguish” when they are clear‑cut. We garden if we cannot get to the woods. On vacations, we gravitate toward the cathedrals of Europe, whose ancient stones allow us to touch “gathered time” if not eternity. Taylor even ventures that poetry opens up to us an “interspace” in which our tired brains can satisfy our “metabiological” need for communion with nature.

For metabiology, read theology. Plenty of holes have opened up in the fly screens that Taylor once installed to separate his philosophical writings from his Roman Catholicism. Cosmic Connections is the kind of book that a late Victorian reverend might have published, in which poets had doctrines as well as rhyming schemes and were made to bear unconscious witness to revelation. Although broad in its tastes, it is monotonous in its conception of what poetry is about: the truth. Its digressive concluding chapters set out a thoroughly Roman Catholic anthropology: the “divine pedagogy” of Saint Irenaeus, the space‑age theodicy of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the eco-encyclicals of Pope Francis all support its hope that humans are moving toward reconciliation with the Creation, not to mention its creator. If you are not a theist — devout or lapsed — you will likely not share Taylor’s feeling that ours is a sunken condition. You will look at mountains without being “addressed” by them or “called upon to answer.” And you will not need poetry to help you work out what they are asking you.

Taylor concedes that the cosmic connection he pursues over hundreds of pages might be a “total illusion.” He offers us “hunches” rather than realities. His disarming tentativeness allows him to write brilliantly on Charles Baudelaire and Rainer Maria Rilke, who fascinate him because of the melancholy precision with which they describe our fading capacity for transcendent experience. Rilke’s elegies record the thrilling moments in which our hearts fill with “overabundant existence” (Überzähliges Dasein) but also show how the chatter of the everyday “interpreted world” drowns them out. Taylor sketches a further retreat from these glimmers of connection in later writers. Modernist poets devoted themselves to tracing how language closes in on itself, pursuing Stéphane Mallarmé’s thought that poetry should aim to paint not the thing but the effect it produces on us.

The result is a requiem for poetry, describing how poets gradually abandoned the effort to convey what Matthew Arnold called “the knowledge of our buried life.” This is a variant of the argument that Taylor once offered about the history of Christianity: our disenchantment turns out to owe more to the fateful decisions of poets and believers than to mechanistic processes of secularization. This melancholic tale of poetry’s fall from grace runs counter to his earlier insistence that there is much to gain from rehabilitating the poetic character of all speech. Like much of Taylor’s work, it also tells a very top‑down story about how change happens, in which revolutions occur within a handful of great minds — those whose writings are his favourites.

Taylor has nonetheless given us 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 perhaps to the cosmos. Cosmic Connections appears just as gloom is mounting about the commercialized automation of writing, the degradation of political language, and the disintegration of social cohesion. It invites us to consider these pressing evils as connected and to resist them by drawing upon literature to refresh our own speech.