Abstract
Romanticism, for Charles Taylor, takes place in an “age of disenchantment,” which is ameliorated by poets seeking “cosmic connections”: relations with reality, by way of symbol and music, that make surer contact with reality than we otherwise might do. Even in our post-Romantic age, we still seek deeper meanings, for ourselves and others, in the same ways, although perhaps with less confidence. “Romanticism,” for T., emerges in the wake of a breakdown of a sense of cosmic order, both in itself and in our moral responses to it. Curiously, no attention is given to Romantic traits that appear long before the Jena Romantics: Homer’s Odyssey, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, for instance, bear several traits of “Romance” that we expect to find in later writing. The very lack of critical engagement with the difficulty of saying just what Romanticism is indicates that T. runs a historical, indeed historicist, thesis hard throughout this long book. Romanticism, for him, stretches from Hölderlin to Milosz; but figures who do not sit easily in this continuum are passed over. What are we to make of Byron (evoked in just five lines) and Dickinson, not to mention Larkin? If there are no counter-examples, there are also puzzling blanks and odd inclusions: nothing much is said of Stevens, and nothing of Ashbery, yet Proust’s great novel (hardly a poem or even poetic for most of its length) is covered. There is talk of “deep time” and yet not a word is said about the “spots of time” passages in Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805, 1850).
Cosmic Connections is a long book; it runs to 620 pages, many of which are taken up with overlong quotations and, when needed, translations. Almost all of it is a thin wash of intellectual history lightly brushed over individual poems. The thesis itself is scarcely new to students of Romanticism, so we look to T.’s readings of specific poems, and this is where the weakness of the book becomes apparent. T. is not a good reader of poetry, regardless of the language in which it is written: he tells one nothing new. Nor is T. a bad reader of poetry: he says few things that are actually wrong. The fact is that T. does not read at all. His commentary floats over any given poem, dealing in airy generalities. From time to time, one hears sighs that the poetry is “magic” that cannot be fully fathomed (147), or even a disarming confession that he “may very well be wrong” (451). Often, we recall the kind of amateur literary criticism of the Victorian and Edwardian ages that preceded the close attention to poems that one associates with Richards, Leavis, and Eliot.
At no time is anything fresh said of any of the poets considered. All too often, the discussion is so brief as not to add anything at all to what is put before us. The analysis of Hopkins’s “The Windhover” is characteristic. After some clichés about what the poem says, which barely reach the standard of SparkNotes, we pass to Hopkins’s “philosophical account of what an inscape is.” Now Hopkins coined the word “inscape” in his undergraduate notes on Parmenides; if he was influenced by anyone at that time it was most likely John Ruskin’s advice for artists to register “the individual character and liberty of the separate leaves, clouds, or rocks” in his Elements of Drawing (1857), which Hopkins had known since he was a teenager. Hopkins came across the word haecceitas only later, in Manresa House, when he skimmed Scotus’s Scriptum Oxoniense super Sententiis. It must have been a delightful confirmation of his own idea. It does not help T. that he misquotes the poem. The sonnet begins “I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-” and the hyphenated end word is perhaps one of the most remarkable enjambments in English. It makes a high “i” sound that gives the first of the strong rhymes in the octave (“king’,” “wing,” “swing,” “thing”) and that offsets the weak “i” rhymes (“riding,” “striding,” “gliding,” “hiding”). We hear the kestrel as we read the poem. In his misprinting of the poem, Taylor has the first line flatly ending with “kingdom,” thereby occluding the rhyme and its effect.
This is not the only time T. misquotes poetry. T.S. Eliot’s line about “heart of light” in “Burnt Norton” is bent out of shape. The line runs, “The surface glittered out of heart of light,” not “The surface glittered out of the heart of light” (543). (It is quoted correctly on p. 509.) We are told that Eliot’s line in The Waste Land, “I had not thought that death had undone so many” is an “obvious borrowing of the third line from Dante’s Inferno” (496). It is not: it occurs in canto 3, line 57 (Eliot quotes the paraphrase in the Temple edition). And so on. One can only wonder, given this sort of thing, as well as the slack prose throughout, if Taylor’s manuscript was read by outside readers or even corrected by a copyeditor. Certainly, the book is badly organized with too many afterthoughts and explanations coming after chapters.
One might expect T. to be more informed about intellectual history, but even here he falls short of what a reader might reasonably expect. Phenomenology, he tells us, “was prolonged and transformed at another ‘moment,’ close to the middle of the twentieth century, in the writings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty” (p. 291). This is a bit late for Heidegger, whose phenomenological work peaked in Being and Time (1927), and it fails to recognize that phenomenology has continued, sometimes in original and vibrant ways, right up to our own time in the writings of Jean-Luc Marion, among others, not least of all in some authors, such as Jean-Louis Chrétien, who write about poetry. In general, one misses contemporary discussion of poetry and philosophy in the book. One of the most provocative studies of Romanticism in recent decades has been Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Nancy’s L’Absolu littéraire: Théorie de la littérature du romanticism allemande (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978); it is not mentioned, nor are seminal works by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Olivier-Thomas Venard, and Thomas Pfau, whose Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022) is the sort of book that T.’s book might have been—detailed, scrupulous, intellectually venturesome—but that it most certainly isn’t.