A Wider Space of Meaning: Poetry As a Resonant Response to Disenchantment

This critical notice discusses Charles Taylor’s last book, Cosmic Connections (2024). The work is first contextualized against Taylor’s intellectual path by asking what philosophical question is answered by the image of poetry as an extra or para-epistemic response to modern disenchantment. The second part of the essay reconstructs Taylor’s argument as follows. After describing how Romanticism revolutionized the way moderns enter a resonant relationship with the cosmos by resorting to the notions of “interspace” and “epistemic retreat”, he outlines the trajectory of this insight within post-Romantic poetry. While Rilke and Hopkins continue the search for a resonant whole with the converging images of “inscape” and “Weltinnenraum”, Baudelaire and Mallarmé take modern disenchantment to its extreme consequences without, however, quenching the evocative power of the lyrical force field. With the “modernist” Eliot and Miłosz, the sense of intellectual powerlessness scales back from the heights reached by the Symbolists, but the search for a believable cosmic order does not go beyond a stubborn faith in the “ethogenic” potentials of human history. Accordingly, Taylor’s book ends with an examination of the prospects for an ethical growth of humanity and its dependency on the spiritual goal of uncovering mimetic, narrative, and theoretical ways to strengthen resonant bonds with others and the world.