In Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot called poetry “a raid on the inarticulate.” I’ve always liked the phrase. It implies the chaotic mess of life in a postlapsarian world is mimicked in language’s fragmentary nature. It also implies poets can do something about it, diving into the deep as they find treasure and nourishment. Having found them, they can offer them for our benefit. There’s something clandestine about the whole operation—a raid—reminiscent of the Promethean theft of fire.
If Eliot is right, and if the metaphor holds, we have a record of the greatest of such attempts in Charles Taylor’s new book Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment. What gold has surfaced? What nourishment is on offer? And how do we reconcile any of this with the God who is himself the Word, the logic, the order underlying everything?
Taylor phrases it like this: “Romantic art as a response to the loss of cosmic order begets the aspiration to reconnect” (89). People feel a loss of connection in many dimensions: between one another, between themselves and nature, between themselves and the past. They feel, at least some of them, that poetry is a vehicle for mending that disconnect.
Taylor’s animating question in this new volume is how this reconnection happens. Why does reading another human’s artful language momentarily alleviate the dislocation from reality many modern people feel?
Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
Charles Taylor
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, Miłosz, and beyond.
Experience Poetry
Taylor diagnoses the modern condition: “We need a relation to the word, the universe, to things, forests, fields, mountains, seas, analogous to that we have to human beings we love and works of art; where we feel ourselves addressed, and called upon to answer” (130). Oh, how we experience this dislocation. Prone to wander, Lord I feel it! We’re relational by design and cry out like the very stones when estranged from our natures.
His answer is that the experience of poetry—not simply to read it but “to let oneself be carried by it”—is to “experience a strong sense of connection” and that to feel the connection “is to strengthen it, to enter into it more fully” (18). Taylor briefly references music and painting but argues across 600 pages for poetry’s ability to engender such connections.
Read the full essay at The Gospel Coalition →
Originally published in The Gospel Coalition, 2024-07-10.
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