How Poetry Responds to a Disenchanted World

Charles Taylor is one of the few contemporary philosophers to have become a familiar name. At least for Christians in our day, his theses on the nature of secularity, lengthily introduced in A Secular Age (2007), are sources of ongoing puzzlement.

A secular age, on Taylor’s account, is an age of options. It is true, his book argued, that the states of the West have been secularized in the sense of effecting a complete separation not only of church and state but of creed and society. And, yes, portions of the West are unbelieving and irreligious; they are secular in that sense too. But, on the whole, Taylor saw not only a continued widespread manifestation of religious belief and practice but a proliferation and pluralization of those things. What characterizes our secular age, he argued, is not the disappearance of religion but its diversification, its divergence into a whole range of possibilities, none of which is required for social participation and all of which are available.

An early page in that book describes a phenomenon perhaps rare in an individual’s life but nonetheless widespread -- those “moments of experienced fullness, of joy and fulfillment, where we feel ourselves there.” These are what Christians would call instances of epiphany, theophany, revelation. The problem Taylor explores is that though such experiences may be common enough in our lives -- they may even be universal -- modern people understand and interpret them in various ways. The experience may be one and characteristically human, but the accounts we give will be many. This, in brief, is the secular condition.

In both A Secular Age and an earlier book, Sources of the Self (1989), Taylor tries to describe how such experiences shift as the background of our cultures, our “imaginaries,” changes over time, and how the experiences nonetheless persist. In this new volume, Cosmic Connections, he examines one specific historical period, from the rise of Romanticism at the end of the 18th century to the aftermath of modernism.

Another concern related to his theory of the secular led Taylor to write this book. In The Language Animal (2016), he explored the linguistic theory of the German Romantics, which, among other things, held that there are two different ways of using language. Some uses are purely practical and relate to the world of objects that we may sense and manipulate. But some uses of language can reveal, or bring “us into contact with, a deeper reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken.” This higher use of language is what the Romantics meant by poetry. Taylor’s aim in Cosmic Connections is threefold: As a historian of “imaginaries,” he (a) explains what Romantic poetry tried to do and also (b) shows what became of that project as time passed and the age became more secular; as a philosopher, he (c) takes a step back in order to ask whether the Romantics and their descendants were in some sense right.

Taylor finds something invaluable in the Romantics because they chose to “bypass” modern philosophy in order to speak untrammeled by skepticism of the human need for “fullness.” The philosopher Louis Dupré once remarked during a lecture that he had turned to the Romantics because, while the modern philosophers had abandoned the love of wisdom, the poets had not. Taylor does something of the same. His enthusiasm for the poets discussed makes for pleasant and profound reading.

Taylor’s story begins with Renaissance thinkers, whose interest in Plato, mathematics, and other, more esoteric theories of the “signatures” of natural things gave to that age a sense that human beings were participants in a stable and meaningful cosmic order. A. O. Lovejoy called this the perception of “the great chain of being,” in a book of that title. With the rise of the new physical sciences and radical empiricist schools of philosophy, the modern West experienced what Max Weber first called “disenchantment”: The world is matter in motion, and what governs it is a series of discoverable mechanistic laws rather than intelligible principles that constitute a cosmos (a rich, providential order).

The Romantics sensed the absence of that sense of cosmic order and were quick to come up with a historical theory to explain its breakdown. Human beings had once lived in intuitive contact with the cosmos -- or, in Romantic language, nature. That contact had been lost, whether through the progress of civilization, of industrialization, or of scientific reason. The poet must therefore craft a new, “subtler language,” a poetic language, to bring the modern person back into contact -- inevitably tenuous and uncertain contact -- with the transcendent order of nature for which the soul longs. Romanticism was not only a way of explaining our occasional experiences of fullness; it was a way of bringing those experiences about and indeed justifying the value of human life.

So, Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey feels the spirit of nature rolling through all things and drawing human subjects and natural objects into communion. He shares the theory with us and draws us in along the way. Hölderlin has a sense of the gods who should be present in nature but who have, in modernity, fled. The possibility of connection to the transcendent becomes more elusive with the later Romantics, but then Gerard Manley Hopkins drinks deep of the Romantic spirit along with the scholastic metaphysics of Duns Scotus to perceive the divine presence with a new and greater intensity.

Hopkins marks a change. Whereas the Romantics perceived the visible as a veil for an invisible pantheistic spirit, Hopkins re-situates Christ right at the heart -- the “inscape” -- of particular beings. This explains Taylor’s otherwise surprising turn from Hopkins to the symbolist poetics of Rilke and Baudelaire. For both of these poets, the cosmic connection is interior to things. Instead of a connection with eternity, for instance, Baudelaire envisions a deep time, a kind of immanent substitute for the Christian idea of the nunc stans, the eternal present of God that transcends time and space alike.

All of these figures, with the possible exception of Hopkins, exemplify what Taylor rightly calls a “strategic retreat.” As the disenchantment of the world proceeds, each of these poets attempts to find a refuge for depth, a place of quality and meaning, that may still be plausible. But this is not the end of the story. Taylor turns to T. S. Eliot and Czesław Miłosz, who benefited from, but saw through, the Romantics and the Symbolists to find “an original way to create a picture of a believable cosmic order.” What both had in common was a refusal to bypass philosophy. In their distinctive ways, they drew philosophy back into poetry so that it could offer more than a “subtler language” regarding the metaphysical order of things. Poetry could grapple with truth and could do so not as a consolation prize for disenchantment but as a genuine renewal of the earlier classical and Christian visions of the cosmos.

Taylor’s books are known for being stuffed, even overstuffed. His style at its best is that of an ordinary person alert to the intricacies of human life and trying to find an adequate language to describe them and think about them. In his work we find the kind of fascination that comes with poking at something with a stick to see how it moves. The result is, perhaps inevitably, something of a baggy monster, however, and this book has more loose ends than I could count, not to mention a penultimate chapter that demonstrates Taylor’s ignorance of American culture. (A Canadian, he does not allow that ignorance to stop him from making stern condemnations.) That said, 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.

The greatest strength of this book is Taylor’s willingness to read the poets as more than literary artifacts. Their perceptions are worth taking seriously as possible accounts of the fullness we all sometimes experience. The weakness of the book is that Taylor can conceive no better way to justify their insights than by an appeal to the language of experience. That will not do, and for a reason Eliot hints at in “The Dry Salvages”:

We had the experience but missed the meaning,

And approach to the meaning restores the experience

Taylor begins with the premise that most of us have experiences of fullness. What causes our frustration is that our interpretations of the meanings of such experiences are various, often reductive, and usually uncompelling. With his concentrated realizations of poetic form, Eliot argued from experiences to meaning by showing that we could not have the former were we not rooted in a supernatural order that transcends them and constitutes the latter. The Romantics and Hopkins argued that reason is no neutral instrument; a predisposition of the will rooted in faith and love is necessary if we are to see the world as it really is. Reason without love is blind. Even Baudelaire, in typically French fashion, shows us a pathway through the depravity of the world as we know it to the reality of evil and on, consequently, to the possibility of a genuine good. Of all the figures discussed in this book, only Wordsworth risked the kind of question-begging that would have experience alone serve to justify confidence in our accounts of our experiences (“Tintern Abbey” again).

Taylor is right to find in these poetic visions substantial accounts of reality that push back against the philosophy of disenchantment. But he proves inadequate to the task of articulating how poetic language and poetic form arrest, communicate, persuade, and convince in ways that are neither merely rational argumentation nor raw appeals to the subjective feelings of experience. To do so, he would have needed to look more closely at both the Renaissance and classical understandings of poetic form as a microcosm of the cosmos -- just the sort of conception the Romantics had lost but were struggling to regain. If Taylor fails in this respect, 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.