Description
A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year
A major new work by Charles Taylor: the long-awaited follow-up to The Language Animal, exploring the Romantic poetics central to his theory of language.
The Language Animal, Charles Taylor's 2016 account of human linguistic capacity, was a revelation, toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most fundamental selves. But, as Taylor noted in that work, there was much more to be said. Cosmic Connections continues Taylor's exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to disenchantment and innovations in language.
Reacting to the fall of cosmic orders that were at once metaphysical and moral, the Romantics used the symbols and music of poetry to recover contact with reality beyond fragmented existence. They sought to overcome disenchantment and groped toward a new meaning of life. Their accomplishments have been extended by post-Romantic generations into the present day. Taylor's magisterial work takes us from Hölderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley to Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, and on to Eliot, Milosz, and beyond.
In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life, the language of poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere. Rather, Taylor insists, poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature, poetry's reasoning will often be incomplete, tentative, and enigmatic. But at the same time, its insight is too moving--too obviously true--to be ignored.
Product Details
| Publisher | Belknap Press |
| Publish Date | May 21, 2024 |
| Pages | 640 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Hardback |
| EAN/UPC | 9780674296084 |
| Dimensions | 9.3 X 6.3 X 2.0 inches | 2.3 pounds |
About the Author
Reviews
No one has this sort of range, erudition, and lucidity...[Taylor] is certainly the leading Catholic philosopher in the world.--Robert B. Pippin "Mind" (2/28/2025 12:00:00 AM)
Offers us something more complicated and interesting than just spreading the good news about poems... [Taylor's] accounts of the poems are informed and lucid, at times disarming in their personal investment...the commentary has all the expository command of Taylor at his best.--Seamus Perry "Times Literary Supplement" (3/7/2025 12:00:00 AM)
[This] transcontinental exploration of the Romantic poetic tradition from William Wordsworth
to Annie Dillard...responds to what we may call our 'postliberal' moment. Given the broad social alienation, collapse of shared epistemologies, and spread of antidemocratic sentiments across the globe, it is not the independence and creative groundlessness of the Romantics that Taylor calls upon here, but their linguistic representation of attachment across space and time.
A masterpiece that sheds light on why a poet such as Kurt Cobain speaks to us even when he sings cryptic lyrics, why the environmentalist movement expresses a kind of spirituality, and why analytic
philosophers should read Continental philosophy and Romantic poetry.
A wonderful demonstration of the power of literature to make us think and feel.--Adam Kirsch "New York Review of Books" (11/14/2024 12:00:00 AM)
[Taylor's] working theory seems to be that he has found in the poetics of cosmic connection a deep sense of significance, and he wants for us to find it too. Despite the different underlying stories, the endlessly diverging and never resolving meanings and symbols and significations, he finds that poetry still calls to him, still makes claims on him that are definite in their effect if not in their propositional content. Why should that be the case, for him or for anyone else? What is it that keeps drawing us back to these wells? This book is his answer.--Jeff Reimer "The Bulwark" (10/29/2024 12:00:00 AM)
Monumental...the whole work is nothing if not tantalizing. On page after page are telling phrases and casually dropped insights, reminding us of Taylor's intellection freshness and penetration...a book of spacious horizons, deep insight, [and] characteristically generous engagement.--Rowan Williams "First Things" (11/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)
An immensely ambitious book...an extraordinarily original, ambitious, and erudite effort to excavate the roots of Romanticism and place it in a new and vital relation with the rest of Western (and not solely Western) culture...a cosmic achievement.--George Scialabba "Commonweal" (10/30/2024 12:00:00 AM)
A labor of love...a worthy swan song.--Matt McManus "Christian Socialism" (9/30/2024 12:00:00 AM)
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.--Michael Ledger-Lomas "Literary Review of Canada" (9/9/2024 12:00:00 AM)
At once a meticulously precise examination of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and, more ambitiously, an urgent call for what we might refer to as 'poetic realism.'--Tara Isabella Burton "The Dispatch" (7/13/2024 12:00:00 AM)
Demonstrates awe-inspiring range and a fundamental belief in the power of art...a broad-ranging, occasionally startling, and often moving book...beautifully argued [and] lovingly rendered.--Mischa Willett "Gospel Coalition" (7/12/2024 12:00:00 AM)
Ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, [this book] is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them.--Adam Gopnik "New Yorker" (6/24/2024 12:00:00 AM)
A return to form for Taylor...a worthy milestone in an extraordinary career.--Stevan Veljkovic "European Journal of Social Theory" (5/24/2024 12:00:00 AM)
Taylor is a perceptive reader of his poets, and he offers a wonderful synthesis of how poets from the Romantics onward have sought to overcome the 'disenchanted' vision of reality...he calls our attention to a way of understanding the Romantic age that makes it appear lively, salient, and worthy of the reader's contemplation.--James Matthew Wilson "National Review" (5/16/2024 12:00:00 AM)
Taylor shows how...poetry...puts readers in contact with experiences of divine harmony, of supernatural order, of a joy which is the direct result of a situated haecceity, which is to say, of the thisness of poetic experience...[this book] dares to treat poetic language as a unique category of communication unto itself that is as distinct as it is elusive to the understanding.--Matthew Hunter "Chronicle of Higher Education" (5/22/2024 12:00:00 AM)
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