Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

Charles Taylor's Cosmic Connections is the long-awaited follow-up to The Language Animal, and it delivers exactly what the earlier book promised: a sustained examination of how Romantic and post-Romantic poetry responds to the collapse of cosmic orders that once unified the metaphysical and the moral. Published by Harvard University Press in 2024, it is Taylor's most comprehensive engagement yet with the relationship between poetry, language, and the search for meaning in a disenchanted world.

Taylor takes readers from Holderlin, Novalis, Keats, and Shelley through Hopkins, Rilke, Baudelaire, and Mallarme, and on to Eliot, Milosz, and beyond. His central argument is that poetry does not merely ornament ideas developed elsewhere. It persuades through the experience of connection, offering a form of conviction that is different in kind from what argument alone can provide. The incompleteness and enigma that critics sometimes treat as weaknesses are, on Taylor's account, essential to what poetry can do that other forms of discourse cannot.

For faculty in philosophy, literary studies, and the humanities broadly, this book is a major event. It speaks to anyone teaching philosophy of language, Romantic literature, secularization theory, or the philosophy of religion. Taylor, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at McGill University, has been building toward this argument for decades, and Cosmic Connections stands as a capstone work in one of the most significant philosophical projects of the last half century.