Having in my previous two posts on Charles Taylor summarized his basic concerns and introduced some of his central concepts, in particular ‘resonance’ and ‘cosmos’, I turn to his philosophical history of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry. This occupies approximately three-quarters of the 598-page book, so my presentation is necessarily selective, though, I hope, not idiosyncratic. In my first post I gave the barest outline, and again: Taylor sees an epochal change in European cultures around the year 1800, a change that of course is neither instantaneous nor simple, but whose most basic feature is the loss of a secure and institutionally and culturally sustained sense of human beings living within ‘The Great Chain of Being’. Living with this conception provided human beings with a sense of the cosmos as a whole, their place within that cosmos, and a felt sense of their connection to both natural entities within the cosmos and of the cosmos itself. With the loss of that secure conception, human beings experience a kind of alienation, something they seek to overcome through re-connecting with the cosmos, if no longer in the old sense then at least under a new conception that is appropriate to their best understanding of themselves and of nature. Romantic poetry, in particular that of Wordsworth, Hölderlin, and Novalis, bears this cultural burden and cultural task of re-connection, and these poets present a kind of maximal response that offers a renewed conception of the cosmos, as well as some sense of how it can be and is experienced. Later, post-Romantic poets retreat from the demand to present a new conception of the cosmos into an intensified focus on the scene of poetry itself, and with it a new sense and rich sense of time as quotidian and/or historical. Recently, even this transformed and as it were post-cosmic sense of the whole as temporal is lost as our current conception of the whole, nature understood in an evolutionary and ecological manner, does not admit of presentation in poetry, and the cultural burden passes to certain kinds of reflective, descriptive, and personalized prose.
Let’s move closer and consider first Taylor’s account of Romantic thought and its poetry. The most general features of what Taylor calls ‘the new Romantic outlook’ were the Romantics’ adoption of new conceptions of nature in its relation to human beings, a new conception of human freedom, and a new aim for humanity. Nature as a whole comes to be conceived as a developing organism. Human beings are part of this organism and have intimate communication, albeit usually latent, with other natural entities and with nature as a whole. In their activities humans develop themselves and contribute to the development of the whole of nature. The outstanding proximal human aim is to realize oneself fully, and this can only be done autonomously, where ‘autonomy’ is understood both ethically and politically as under circumstances freed from compulsion and coercion. The ultimate aim is to ‘reconcile’ human beings with nature where the seeming isolation of human beings from themselves, from each other, and from nature is overcome. The recognition that this reconciliation has not yet been and may never be achieved leads to a characteristic Romantic tone of irony. (pp. 5-7) One might well think that it is only its vagueness that saves this collection of conceptions from absurdity, and that with good reason post-Romantic poets abandoned parts of the Romantic outlook and devised successor conceptions. In any case Taylor finds the Romantic conception paradigmatically embodied first of all in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ of 1798. In a way that is typical of the entire book he only considers a few key lines, and indeed its most famous ones:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me 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,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of thought,
And rolls through all things.
These lines are the inaugural poetic moment of the epochal transformation. Of course not everyone may experience this, but Taylor claims that if ‘Tintern Abbey’ “as poetry works for someone then they are convinced that they are connecting to an “autonomous order,” which connection has deep significance for them. That is why they are moved. But there is a difference with earlier ages. There one could say that I am moved because I am convinced of this order (Great Chain, or concordia discors, or whatever). These two phases can be distinguished. But the reader of Wordsworth is convinced through being moved.” (p. 34) So Romantic poetry at its most serious neither primarily refers to some pre-existent order, nor merely state a new conception of order, but rather moves the suitably receptive viewer in such a way that they sense they are connected with some (perhaps largely or wholly indeterminate) order. The Romantic poems are a kind of modern epiphanies, “which both (partially) reveal the Plan/direction of things and put us in empowering contact with it.” Put alternatively, such works have a ‘transfiguration effect’ “on some scene, by which a deeper order becomes visible, or shines through.” (p. 40) This is “the domain of resonance” (p. 41). A general way of putting these fundamental points would be to say that, whereas pre-Romantic poetry may designate, represent, and/or reveal some prior order, Romantic poetry discovers the new order in creating it (pp. 43 and 126).
Taylor goes on to give similar accounts of Hölderlin, Novalis, and Shelley, with Keats figuring as transitional to post-Romantic poetry. Taylor suggests that Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ offers something new in heightening and intensifying our experience not of the old or new cosmos, but rather of the fully ripened season, and with it “a more intense sense of the space enclosing us” (p. 134). Concern for the larger order is abandoned in favor of articulating and transforming the particular experience described and evoked; accordingly ‘To Autumn’ is an inaugural instance of the ‘epistemic retreat’ from the Romantics’ claim to create a new order in favor of the post-Romantic “poetic discoveries/inventions of epiphanic languages” (p. 137) whose foci shall be, as previously noted, particular natural scenes or objects, along with the various aspects of the human relation to time, and the transfiguration of these through poetry so that they become scenes of resonance.
Although Taylor’s accounts of post-Romantic poets occupies approximately two-thirds of the book, I shall consider it only briefly, as there are many dozens of pages consisting simply of the poems in English, French, and German (the latter also with full translations), and the points Taylor makes mostly just illustrate his general claims about the already-stated character of the post-Romantics’ epistemic retreat. Taylor does introduce and develop the conception of ‘higher times’, which are moments that seem to stand out from the quotidian course of time, and which seem to gather, focus, and stabilize larger stretches of time in striking and memorable ways. Taylor thinks this conception emerges prominently in Baudelaire, but his extended account of such times is unsurprisingly through Proust’s evocation of the madeleine in Du côté de chez Swann and the paving stones in Le Temps retrouvé (Taylor’s turn to Proust to provide the exemplum of higher times reminded me of the great Chilean-Mexican novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño’s remark that of course poetry is a greater art form than prose, and the greatest poetry of the twentieth-century is the novels of Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner). Considering ‘higher times’ in Baudelaire, T. S. Eliot, and Proust, Taylor suggests that it takes various forms, whether in the felt sense that the succession of time has disappeared when one is in the grips of an intensely felt event, or in the sense that one has transcended ordinary temporal succession and entered into a different realm, or in the Proustian sense of the fusing of the present and the past in a vivified memory (pp. 384-5).
No one could be surprised to learn that there is a great deal more and of great interest in the book than I’ve discussed here. Some of the most important omissions are his discussion of the notion of a symbol as offering a kind of semi-transparent (or semi-opaque if you’re a pessimist) access to an otherwise hidden realm, his early discussion of the Romantic conception of translation, and the various moments and ways in which he connects his conceptions, narratives, and diagnoses to points in his very large body of earlier writings. And as mentioned early on here, I pass by entirely the penultimate chapter, ‘History of Ethical Growth’, as I do not see how it connects significantly with any of the major points elsewhere in the book. What, then, of Taylor’s diagnosis of our contemporary condition, wherein our conception of nature is such that it does not admit of poetic treatment?
Taylor’s diagnosis is given in a very few pages in the short concluding chapter, ‘Cosmic Connection Today—And Perennially’. He writes oddly that there continue to be traces, but only traces, of concern for cosmic connection in the poetry of the later twentieth century, for instance in the work of Wallace Stevens (‘oddly’ because Stevens died in 1955, and Miłosz, to whose concern for such connection devoted an entire chapter, died in 2004). The reason for this loss of concern, Taylor asserts, is that our most prominent strand of sensibility regarding this concern comes from “the discoveries of science, and the more and more detailed grasp of the intricate orders, both macroscopic and microscopic, in which we live.” Crucially (it seems to me) for Taylor in our contemporary scientific cosmology “[t]here are no more higher and lower levels”; instead our awed vision is of “the whole structure and its evolution over eons [that] inspires awe”, and “[t]hese interwoven orders are not revealed in poetry” (p. 588). For something of our contemporary cosmic re-connection, we should turn instead to writing like Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that offers careful descriptions of intense personal experiences of nature and place, or to the local religions of indigenous communities that locate some particular place within its larger environment and as a spiritual expression of some creator god or spirit. (pp. 589-93)
There is nothing in Taylor’s great body of writing to suggest that he aims to shock his readers, but that was certainly my initial response to his diagnosis of our time. I cannot be the book’s only reader who thinks that, even if one grants his major claims, this diagnosis seems as wrong-headed as it is cursory. Like many readers my initial reaction is to sputter: ‘What about X, and Y, and Z?!’ By way of conclusion, I’ll briefly consider one ‘X’ and suggest that Taylor’s misdiagnosis reveals some problems with his conceptions. My ‘X’ shall be, in the manner of Taylor, a very few words from one of the greatest experimental poets of our time, Lyn Hejinian, who died earlier this year. Hejinian was the author of a great many short books of poetry over fifty years, with further work forthcoming posthumously; but among an audience broader than that for experimental poetry, her best known work is surely My Life, published in 1980 with further editions of supplemental material, and which has become a standard work in the academic study and teaching of contemporary poetry. The work consists of a number of sections, something like unindented paragraphs, each of which is headed by a separated, rectangular space on the page that contains a very short stretch of sub-sentential text in italics. The italicized text surely is meant to be understood as related to the accompanying section’s more sustained prose--but there is no certainty whether as caption, chapter title, epigraph, or counterpoint. The famous opening italicized phrase is ‘a pause, a rose, something on paper’. First consider the phrase in isolation from its context: An initial plain reading suggests a temporal sequence, with a perceiver/writer stopping herself—to notice, to reflect, to recall—and there’s a rose. If noticed, the rose is seen; if given through reflection, the rose is imagined; if recalled, it’s the memory of a rose (a particular rose, or a type of rose, or a generic rose?). But the poetic effect takes place, in something like the ways that William Empson memorably analyzed nearly a hundred years ago in Seven Types of Ambiguity, and semantic variations seem to wash over the words. One thinks: A pause arose, and that was/was embodied by something on paper. Or one thinks: Is ‘apause’ an archaic noun for ‘apposite’? Or one thinks: Does the pause arise within the things on paper? Is reading a (self-) interruption? And so on without end. Then the text induces the thought: How does this caption (title, epigraph) relate to the section of sustained text, itself consisting of a series of precise and chiseled sentences arranged in rigorous parataxis? The reader’s mind expands to infinity while anchored in something on paper.
I cannot see why something like Hejinian’s text, and with it countless other recent poetic works, would not count for Taylor as a continuation under contemporary conditions of the post-Romantic epistemic withdrawal into a concern for the very interspace of writing and reading. My suggestion, which I adumbrated in an earlier post, is that a problem with Taylor’s account is his peculiarly restricted conception of ‘cosmos’. Recall that for Taylor the concept of cosmos seems to have only two characteristics: it evokes some sense of our largest context, and an all-embracing whole; and its elements are ordered in relations of higher and lower. Since our contemporary evolutionary and ecological conception of nature as cosmos does not admit of such a hierarchy, the relations of higher/lower can only be given in axes of resonance like Dillard’s place-based writing or localist, indigenous religions. But I cannot see any compelling motivation to restrict the relevant conception of cosmos in this way. The thought suggests itself that Taylor’s blindness on this point is of a piece with the most basic concern of his philosophical writing of the past sixty years: to show that the conception of life, human action and ethics, space and time, and nature itself cannot be exhaustively understood with the categories of Newtonian science or with the frigid tools of Enlightenment rationalism. This leads him to import higher/lower relations into the very concept of cosmos itself. But this wrong move condemns that aspect of his thought to archaicism. I cannot see why those of us who have for so long learned from and admired Taylor’s writings should follow him on this point. A richer conception of cosmos could only benefit Taylor’s analyses, as it would provide him with a richer range of conceptual tools.
References:
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930)
Lyn Hejinian, My Life (1980)
Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment
William Wordsworth, ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798)