Jamison Kantor reviews Cosmic Connections

Charles Taylor. Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2024. 620 pp.

Review by Jamison Kantor

23 January 2025

In May 1989, the first McDonald’s in Moscow broke ground, over a million students marched through Beijing protesting for democracy, and one of North America’s foremost philosophers had just published a book that put Romantic thought at the center of political liberalism, whose global tide now seemed inevitable. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Richard Rorty argued that the emergence of the aspirational liberal subject owed something to the Romantic poets, who understood language as expressive and imaginative rather than strictly correspondent with the outside world. To be a liberal was, in part, to create and recreate the self linguistically within the shifting currents of history.

Thirty-five years later, in May 2024, one of North America’s leading philosophers published a book that placed Romanticism at the center of modern society and politics. But Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections—a six-hundred-page 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.

Taylor’s new book traces nothing less than a universal “longing for reconnection” to nature—and each other—after the world has become disenchanted (p. 190). Without “established orders, doctrines, categories” linking the universe to humanity (such as the Great Chain of Being, or belief in a singular, universal language), the Romantics, Taylor proclaims, create art that “yearn[s] for reunion . . . between ourselves and the larger world of nature, and between individuals in society” (pp. 71, 27). Although Taylor—in what struck me as a kind of mirror-world version of Fredric Jameson’s epic criticism—takes up Friedrich Schlegel’s idealist philosophy, Beethoven’s symphonies, and Paul Cézanne’s Postimpressionist painting, Romantic poetry is his primary concern. Made of living rather than dead or instrumental language, the Romantic lyric tries to reconstitute the felt presence of the cosmos through representations of epiphany and, especially, symbols, the trope in which “meaning is so closely embedded in the form” that we cannot paraphrase it (p. 480).

If this sounds like a throwback to the New Criticism and those bygone studies of long Romanticism like Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image (1957), then Taylor also gestures to our current fascination with affect and readerly feeling. For him, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, produce a “constitutive inner rhythm” that allows us to feel a personal connection to nature and one another across space and time (p. 165). This “interspace” generates “a kind of accord, solidarity, sympathy, across the ages” (p. 325).

And yet, for all its buoyant universalism, Cosmic Connections returns habitually to one of Romanticism’s central impasses: the inability of modern language to recover those lost unions. Indeed, “Romantic poetry,” Taylor realizes, “is full of evocations of the absent” (p. 417). Rather than address these textual vacancies directly—and, in so doing, reassess the relation between Romanticism and poststructuralism that defined Romantic studies in the later twentieth century—Taylor suggests that human intuitions and aspirations for unity will overcome the fragility of our language.

In other words, the most telling absence in this grand and contemplative book is a candid reckoning with deconstruction, or, more specifically, with the weakness of modern signification embodied by so many Romantic lyrics. You might also say that Richard Rorty—who engaged with Jacques Derrida in this journal and with whom Taylor said he had an “old debate” about social rootedness—is the other unmentionable presence in Cosmic Connections.[i] For Rorty represents the flipside of an enduring liberal dialectic that emerges in the early nineteenth century: not the institutional, grounded commitments of Edmund Burke or the later Wordsworth, but the playful, revolutionary spirit of Lord Byron or Toussaint Louverture, in whom recent scholars have seen a similar irreverence towards signification.[ii]

Our postliberal moment demands connections across identities and among varieties of life. It may also require, Taylor implies, a recommitment to values that resist the play of form. But it is precisely this formal groundlessness—whether it is embraced for self-liberation or exploited to dissolve democracy—that we inherit from the Romantics and for which we have yet to account.

[i] Richard Rorty, “Deconstruction and Circumvention,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 1 (1984): 1–23; Charles Taylor, “Rorty and Philosophy,” in Richard Rorty, ed. Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (Cambridge, Mass., 2003), p. 158.

[ii] See Theresa M. Kelley, “Toussaint Louverture: Creating a Public Romantic Subject,” in Haiti’s Literary Legacies: Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution, ed. Kir Kuiken and Deborah Elise White (New York, 2022), pp. 71–94.