Charles Taylor’s Sublime Shortcomings

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” W.H. Auden wrote in 1939. The philosopher Charles Taylor disagrees. In his new book, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, Taylor has set out to mount a defense of poetry that understands it as a secular form of ritual. Against the temptation to think of poetry as a purely descriptive activity in which experiences, feelings, and perspectives are simply recorded in verse, Taylor’s book tries to prove that poetry produces, by means of its language, experiences of connection that modernity has rendered otherwise obsolete.

When William Wordsworth writes in “Tintern Abbey,” for instance, that he has

Felt
A presence that disturbs [him] with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion, and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things,

he is describing exactly the poetic experience that Taylor has in mind. Whereas in earlier epochs religious ritual had the special purpose of producing “a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused,” in the Romantic period poetry would come to take on that role. The “disenchantment” of Taylor’s subtitle — the worldly rationalist attitude that Max Weber thought was the price of modernity — is the ailment that poetry promises to cure. At a moment when, as Taylor has it, religiously inflected paradigms of thinking were being discarded — chief among them the belief that language could accurately reflect some divine order — Romantic poets and their heirs cultivated a language of what Taylor calls “reconnection,” a language which takes our “links with the cosmos” and makes them “palpable for you in a way which moves you and hence restores your link to them.”

At the heart of Taylor’s book is a story about language. Its animating question is, how we can believe in language’s power to do important and valuable things in the world when our words are no longer reflective of any divine order? The book’s guiding answer is that poetry demonstrates the capacity of language to establish “connections” that are otherwise impossible to come by. In the extensive readings that follow the book’s introductory chapters, Taylor shows how the poetry of Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Keats, Novalis, Shelley, Baudelaire, Hopkins, Rilke, Mallarmé, and T.S. Eliot puts readers in contact with experiences of divine harmony, of supernatural order, of a joy which is the direct result of a situated haecceity, which is to say, of the thisness of poetic experience. Language is not incidental to these experiences, but constitutive of them.

In this regard, Cosmic Connections follows from Taylor’s earlier book, The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity. In that work, Taylor dismantled what he called the “designative” view of language propounded by thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Condillac, which reduces the purpose of words to the transmission of information and the encoding of thought. Taylor argued instead for what he called the “constitutive” view, which emphasizes the distinctly creative capacities of language to “mak[e] possible new purposes, new levels of behavior, new meanings.” Readers familiar with the philosophy of performative speech acts that J.L. Austin put forward in How to Do Things with Words might detect a familiar note here, for Austin’s project, too, involved overturning a philosophy — in his case, Gottlob Frege’s — which treated language purely in terms of veracity, information, and truth. But unlike How to Do Things with Words, which famously relegated poetry to the realm of the “parasitic,” The Language Animal frequently resorted to literature to support its arguments, and it concluded with the enticing promise that Taylor’s next book would show how Romantic and post-Romantic poetry incorporated the theories of language that set The Language Animal in motion. So whereas Austin holds that poetry does nothing with words, Taylor, in Cosmic Connections, tries to show us what it does.

This impulse gives the book its bursts of real intellectual excitement. At a moment when literary criticism is still beholden to a historicism that treats the language of poetry as but another symptom of more general cultural conditions, Cosmic Connections dares to treat poetic language as a unique category of communication unto itself that is as distinct as it is elusive to the understanding. Elusiveness, for Taylor, is indeed part of the point of poetry. Whereas descriptive, declarative prose hinges on matters of fact, poetry — by dint of its reliance on figuration — elaborates a different kind of knowledge. “Figuring,” as Taylor has it, “can give insight, but it always leaves something more to be said, more about what features the object has and what it doesn’t. That is why it lacks the finality and clarity that ordinary prose can attain.”

The literary critic William Empson famously proposed that ambiguity was a foundational property of poems, which yoke together words in such ways as to invite a number of different interpretations. Taylor gives Empsonian ambiguity a twist: The friction or mismatch between vehicle and tenor that haunts any metaphor means that there will always be more to say about it. Hardly an assertion of fact, metaphor operates instead as an invitation to criticism, in the sense that it bids interpretations that attempt to fix its meaning but that will never definitively succeed in that effort. Through figuration, poetic art fosters experiences Taylor calls “connection”: The “work of art yields not just a (potentially dispassionate) insight, but a strong experience of connection, or more generally, it transforms our relation to the situation it figures for us.” It is these “strong experiences of connection” that Taylor sets out to track in his readings of Romantic and post-Romantic poets, and it is these readings that ought to constitute a defense of poetry at a moment — the latest in a long line of them — when it is sorely in need of being defended.

The problem is that Cosmic Connections ends up leaving the brilliance of The Language Animal behind. In fact, although the one book is billed as an extension of the other, there is a fundamental disconnection between the two. The Language Animal sought to provide a theoretical account of language use. Cosmic Connections, by contrast, is an essentially historical argument, hinging as it does on a claim that is about intellectual influence. In Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, Taylor seeks to find the stamp of the theories of language that were codified by Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, the German philosophers whom Taylor treats as the progenitors of “constitutive” theories of language. But setting aside the fact that Taylor never meaningfully traces any lines of influence from philosophers to poets, this intellectual history comes close to undoing the theoretical foundation which The Language Animal established. If Romantic poetry needs Hermann, Herder, and Humboldt behind it in order to generate “connections” in keeping with a constitutive theory of language, then that theory turns out to be limited by history. This wouldn’t be a problem if The Language Animal didn’t aspire to account, as its subtitle tells us, for “the full shape of the human linguistic capacity.” This is a transhistorical aspiration, which gets admirably borne out by Taylor’s earlier book, but strangely undercut by his latest. No longer, it turns out, does the constitutive theory of language underpin all language use, but only language used in the wake of a few German philosophers.

This perspective requires the creation of some peculiar straw men. Taylor notes at various points that the Romantic period marks a break with previous epochs thanks, in no small part, to its operative theories of language. In the late Renaissance, we are told, there was a “notion of an ideal language whose terms would figure or capture the essence of the realities they designate, such as the ‘Adamic’ language, or the Creation considered as a book which communicated a message alongside the Bible … [or] Lovejoy’s ‘principle of plenitude,’ or Paracelsus’s ‘signatures,’ the Hermetic theories, or the Kabbalah, to mention some of the best known examples.” Cosmic Connections leans heavily on these “ideal language” theories and their conceptual limitations, because they are necessary in order conceive of the Romantic period as a break with earlier epochs.

While it is true that such theories existed in the Renaissance, it is suggestive that Taylor has little interest in searching for others. If he did, he would have had to account for one of the most important theories of language use of the period, a theory that was also, as it happens, a practice: rhetoric, the widespread, institutionalized revival of which furnished the early modern period with its own “constitutive” theory — and practice — of language use. Reckoning with the history of early modern rhetoric would have required Taylor to concede that the period was not as beholden as he claims to Adamic or Kabbalistic or other “ideal languages.” The epochal break he wishes to stress was not as severe as he claims. In fact, the aesthetic project of Romanticism was frequently motivated by the revival of medieval and early modern poetic forms, but Cosmic Connections paints itself into a corner from which this project cannot be acknowledged.

It is easy to fault a writer for lapses in historical coverage: there’s always something else to cite, and more one could say about the past. But the problem with Cosmic Connections is not simply that it does not provide a thorough enough account of early modernity. It is that the book places excessive faith in a few theorists of language, at the cost of actual situated uses of language. One need only read Petrarch, or Christopher Marlowe, or John Milton to see that, whatever certain theorists of language at the time believed, the actual uses of literary language in the period reflected a conviction in the power of words to do more than reflect their worlds. This is not a historiographical problem, but a disciplinary one: Cosmic Connections is a book that seeks to unite literary criticism and anthropology under the aegis of intellectual history. Yet intellectual history can provide only a limited set of tools when it comes to accounting for what poets do with their words. It is true that the language of poetry establishes forms of connection with its readers. But for this point to be more than a mere banality, the resources of literary criticism are required. For Cosmic Connections, they turn out to be in short supply. Their absence raises questions about how much any history of ideas can illuminate literary objects of study.

Taylor is on firmer ground when he turns his attention to an 18th-century poem like Alexander Pope’s “Windsor-Forest,” but even here there are missed opportunities. Drawing on the argument of Earl Wasserman’s book The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems, Taylor argues that neoclassical poems like Pope’s are designed merely to reflect an existing metaphysical order. But even if a poem like “Windsor-Forest” can be imagined merely to reflect some pre-existing order, the truth of the matter — as The Language Animal shows us — is that its language creates the very order that it seems to reflect. Only by putting the poem into those classic, well measured heroic couplets does Pope pull off the illusion that his language is a mirror held up to nature. Even when language seems “designative,” to use Taylor’s terminology, it is still working in “constitutive” ways. This was an important insight of The Language Animal, but it is one that Cosmic Connections is too quick to forget.

At the same time, when Taylor turns his attention to the Romantic poets and post-Romantic poets who are the heroes of his book, something funny happens. The “designative” view that Taylor sought to banish to the Enlightenment comes back with a vengeance. Even as he seeks to put distance between Pope and the Romantics, Taylor espouses an essentially mimetic approach to poetry in the sense that it is representations of connection that occupy his attention over and against the poetic production of experiences of connection. Lines from Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” for example, are cited multiple times throughout the book because their semantic content provides a covert means of understanding poetic effect. Only because Wordsworth represents a feeling of connection, that is, can Taylor make the case that it produces an experience of connection. This would not be a problem if Cosmic Connections were not so avowedly opposed to “designative” uses of language — and if it were not so committed to tracking the experiences that poetry produces by way of form.

As it stands, the book turns out to be surprisingly inattentive to matters of poetic form, and its readings suffer as a result. Turning to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” Taylor writes that “it is hard to describe” what happens in the poem, but what it effects is “a fusion of some of the most moving features into a more intense image,” which produces a “single powerful sense of presence, of absorbed enclosure in a peak experience.” There is nothing wrong about a statement like this, but there is nothing necessarily right about it, either. The “experience” in question is asserted, but without any of the fine-grained textual attention that would give this word the meaning it deserves. Taylor acknowledges that the “music of sound and images” is constitutive of the experience he wants to capture — “There is a flow here,” he writes, a “flow in the poetic description” which “matches the flow in the lived experience” — but there is nothing to tell us what distinguishes that music and the “experience” it produces.

The argument of Cosmic Connections is distinctly literary, in the sense that it depends, at heart, on the literary-critical practice of close reading. But close reading is exactly what is missing from much of this book, which skims the surface of the poems it chooses to consider, often resorting to paraphrase in lieu of deeper, more discriminating attention. As a result, the “connections” of its title are mystified. The age-old tendency among academics to turn verbs into nouns leads Taylor to take the “connections” of his book for granted. Simply declaring a “connection” is there takes the place of any subtler treatment of the way these connections get established, and the things they connect together.

In an important recent article in New Literary History, the literary critic Nancy Yousef observes that the subfield known as “philosophy of literature” has thrived on its remarkable disregard for the practice of close reading. For practitioners of this field, literature generally has the value of reproducing experiences otherwise unavailable to us, but at the cost of any meaningful engagement with the language that produces it. For Yousef, this resistance to reading is the symptom of “the atrophying of hermeneutic methods within Anglo-American philosophy more broadly.” One wishes that Cosmic Connections were not another example of the aversion she describes. Still, it would be wrong to blame the book’s shortcomings solely on philosophy. If Cosmic Connections is representative of a discipline that struggles to come to terms with literature, it is also a reflection of a literary criticism which has itself become only too eager to look past the words that make it possible.