A Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year A major new work by Charles Taylor: the
long-awaited follow-up to The Language Animal exploring the Romantic poetics central to his
theory of language. The Language Animal Charles Taylor's 2016 account of human linguistic
capacity was a revelation toppling scholarly conventions and illuminating our most
fundamental selves. But as Taylor noted in that work there was much more to be said. Cosmic
Connections continues Taylor's exploration of Romantic and post-Romantic responses to
disenchantment and innovations in language. 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 Mi¿osz and
beyond. In seeking deeper understanding and a different orientation to life the language of
poetry is not merely a pleasurable presentation of doctrines already elaborated elsewhere.
Rather Taylor insists poetry persuades us through the experience of connection. The resulting
conviction is very different from that gained through the force of argument. By its very nature
poetry's reasoning will often be incomplete tentative and enigmatic. But at the same time
its insight is too moving-too obviously true-to be ignored.
