An Unhappy Marriage of Poetry and Philosophy

Charles Taylor is a distinguished retired professor of philosophy. The second paragraph of the preface of his new e book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, outlines his aim:

[T]he e book is about (what I see as) the human want for cosmic connection; by “connection” I imply not simply consciousness of the encompassing world, however one shot by with pleasure, significance, inspiration. My speculation is that the need for this connection is a human fixed, felt by (not less than some) folks in all ages and phases of human historical past, however that the kinds this want takes have been very completely different within the succeeding phases and levels of this historical past. 

His aim is formidable, so it’s unsurprising that his e book falls far in need of its personal ambitions.

Cosmic Connections begins with a topic about which Taylor is passionate: the rise of Romanticism in German philosophy (Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) and German poetry (Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, and the Schlegels) within the 1790s. Taylor additionally discusses main figures who rejected the label “Romantic,” significantly Goethe and Kant.

It doesn’t take lengthy to conclude that this e book is in want of considerable modifying—a job that, sadly, main industrial and educational publishers have largely deserted with their scholarly books (the creator, who looks as if a gracious particular person, didn’t have an editor to thank in his acknowledgments). For instance, pages 5 and 6 embody a listing of 5 “themes and notions” that Taylor believes characterize German Romanticism, however they’re magisterial pronouncements untethered to any earlier or subsequent evaluation of German poetry. The primary quoted poem comes greater than ten pages later—and it’s Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” not a German poem. There isn’t a citation from a German poem till web page sixty-seven, and that one is a brief passage from Goethe, one of many poets whom Taylor cites as rejecting Romanticism. By the point the e book returns to German Romantic poetry on web page ninety-seven for hit-and-run discussions of Hölderlin’s “Der Rhein” and “Der Archipelagus,” the creator has moved on to different topics with obvious confidence that he needn’t present evaluation to help the premises of his sweeping framework for German Romantic poetry.  

At this level within the e book, Taylor’s language has misplaced precision; the reader should slog by incomplete sentences (significantly ones misusing or overusing the phrase “however”), unclear referents, verbs within the passive voice (e.g. “However this isn’t felt as an arbitrarily chosen and imposed ordering however as a unity inherent within the actuality itself”), and non sequiturs. He tacks appendices onto chapters as an alternative of integrating them into his analyses. Virtually not one of the dialogue concerning the particular person poems substantiates the arguments that Taylor lays out early within the e book, and he leaps from concept to concept like an overexcited golden retriever pet.

A few quarter of the best way by the e book’s 600 pages, it turns into clear that the creator awkwardly fused two books. The primary would have made an argument concerning the philosophical content material of Romantic poetry in addition to the affect of German philosophy of that period on that poetry. The second e book would have been a e book of essays with each commentary the creator needed to make about Romanticism that didn’t match into the primary e book. 

By the point the reader reaches an extended chapter mischaracterized as “Historical past of Moral Development,” it’s clear that Taylor needed to put in writing a 3rd very completely different e book as effectively. After lastly coming to the indisputably true assertion that “it ought to be clear that moral human progress shouldn’t be merely linear, or additive, with greater levels constructing on earlier, decrease ones,” our Canadian creator descends into an ill-informed rant about American politics during which his principal goal is Mitt Romney, of all folks:

This slide is a disaster for varied causes. It’s a disaster as a result of it deeply divides, hampers, and paralyzes the democratic society, dividing us into first- and second-class residents. However it’s also a disaster in one other approach as a result of it builds on the deprivations imposed on nonelites by the unfold of a Romney-type moralistic outlook among the many wealthy and highly effective. In lots of Western democracies, this has caused a frustration attributable to a terrific Downgrade in the dwelling requirements of employees, who, consequently, really feel that the system is stacked towards them, that they will’t have an effect on it, and that their citizen efficacy is nearly nonexistent. They are prepared for a program which might liberate the demos or give the demos energy once more, towards the elites.

Solely the demos has now been redescribed—both in a moralist, or ethnic, or historical-precedence approach that excludes many individuals—which has the double drawback that it deeply divides the society, and this second drawback, that it doesn’t meet the precise issues and challenges of the Downgrade. 

The primary paragraph is facile and irrelevant to the remainder of the e book. The second paragraph descends into jargon-ridden incoherence.

Taylor’s intense curiosity in up to date politics doesn’t foreshadow an curiosity in up to date poetry. He begins his dialogue of twentieth-century poets with some competent remarks on T. S. Eliot, albeit remarks that ignore the expectations created by his personal opening chapter. He then races by a collection of hit-and-run analyses of Eliot’s main poems during which he tosses off a sentence or so for each few traces of the poems. His evaluation of the work of Czesław Miłosz is much more superficial and digressive.

Regardless of the grand guarantees implicit within the title of the closing chapter (“Cosmic Connection At this time—And Perennially”), the chapters on Eliot and Miłosz are all that Taylor has to say about up to date poetry. In truth, the closing chapter doesn’t even point out Eliot or Miłosz, but by some means spends time discussing fiction author Annie Dillard for no obvious cause apart from that Taylor likes her work and sees it as having a non secular dimension.

One can’t assist however mourn the misplaced alternative. There isn’t a dialogue of the best non secular poets of the previous fifty years—Elizabeth Jennings, Dana Gioia, or Christian Wiman, to call only a few. There isn’t a dialogue of Dylan Thomas, whose use of language to achieve transcendence shows most of the traits that Taylor rightly sees in Gerard Manley Hopkins. There isn’t a dialogue of poets who reject faith however who nonetheless attain for the supernatural, resembling James Merrill.

One typically will get the sense from Cosmic Connections that the magisterial generalizations about poetry prolong to the poetry of the current day, and that’s unlucky. It’s simply not true that the overwhelming majority of latest poets relate to the world within the methods of the poets mentioned on this e book. In truth, at the moment’s MFA-driven literary advanced has carried out a stunningly environment friendly job of rooting out faith and spirituality from poetry. These gatekeepers relentlessly focus the eye of poets on the physique, a small set of ideological grievances, and the prevalence of sure genetic heritages; they dismiss the craft that Taylor values, and so they present little curiosity within the “pleasure, significance, [and] inspiration” that he values. Poetry paying homage to Eliot, Hopkins, or Rilke has nice issue discovering a house nowadays, however that unhappy truth doesn’t appear to curiosity him. Taylor seems to don’t have any response for, and even an curiosity in, up to date poetry’s rejection of the aspirations of Romanticism.

Cosmic Connections has intermittent charms—it did make me wish to learn Hölderin once more after thirty-five years. It additionally made me suppose tougher concerning the worldviews of a number of different poets. These blessings weren’t enough, nonetheless, to justify the effort and time essential to learn the e book.

Picture by Andrzej Solnica and licensed by way of Adobe Stock.