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...