Lost in the forest of symbols

gist

Jeff Reimer reviews Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections, a late-career doorstopper on Romantic and post-Romantic poetry as a strategy for cosmic reconnection after modern disenchantment. Reimer praises the opening philosophical frame—poetry as an epiphanic interspace of symbols rather than fixed metaphysics—but finds the long middle close readings meandering, a coda to A Secular Age that may still succeed as a personal plea that poetry, not philosophy, tells the age’s deep truth.

ideas

• Romantic poetry answers disenchantment without nostalgia. Taylor reads the Romantics as accepting irreversible modernity while forging symbolic “interspaces” that reconnect persons to cosmic meaning.
• Symbols loosen, they don’t dissolve into mere subjectivity. Epiphanic poetry (Baudelaire’s forest of symbols) offers fragmentary contact with deeper order without recovering a fixed metaphysico-moral cosmos.
• The middle four hundred pages sag. Loving close readings from Hölderlin to Miłosz string quotations with little synthesis; Reimer says Taylor gets lost admiring the trees.
• Payoff is mostly a coda to A Secular Age. The shift from pervasive cosmic presence to higher or gathered time is real but thin after so much exegesis.
• Poetry may be the point of the philosophy. Near the end Taylor treats poetry as calling for a new language close to prayer—the deep truth philosophy cannot say.

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