Can Poetry Re-enchant the Modern World?

“A Bridge Leads From One World to the Next,” from Un Autre Monde (1844) |
J. J. Grandville / Public Domain Image Archive / No Additional Rights

When the protagonist of Miranda July’s recent novel, All Fours, plummets into a crisis, she realizes, at age 45, that she “had entirely misunderstood the assignment, the scale of what life asked of us.” She had “only been living second to second—just coping—this whole time.” Being a writer, the character’s crisis of midlife is also one of art: “Was there any actual enchantment or was it all just survival, ways to muddle through?”  

“Actual enchantment” appears to be the kind of experience Charles Taylor wants to resuscitate in order for us to reconnect to one another. But can his picture of reconnection in Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Harvard University Press, 2024) transform into the solidarity that Taylor hopes for? 

Can something like Miranda July’s picture of reconnection become the solidarity we so desperately need?      

In a long series of major treatises—Sources of the Self, A Secular Age, and now Cosmic Connections—Taylor has explored the long shadow cast by the Enlightenment’s mainstream understanding of scientific rationality.      

Within this essentially Cartesian worldview, according to Taylor, “truth” became a matter of propositions that could be logically analyzed, and our picture of the world became one of a system of physical laws. 

In these works, Taylor explores a rival worldview that develops alongside modern science, what he calls the “expressivist” view of Romanticism, which becomes a major source of modern identity. From the standpoint of the Romantic philosophers, artists, and poets, “authenticity” and a transcendental quest for the cosmic is a central corrective to the modern scientific picture of the world.  

In making a sharp distinction between the Cartesian “clear and distinct” ideas of the mind and the changeable appearances of the world, the insights poetry gives may only tell us something subjective “but nothing at all about the world the poet responds to.” In this opposition between ontology and psychology, scientific and poetic articulation, Taylor seeks an “undistributed middle.” This undistributed middle is what Taylor calls the “interspace.” 

The interspace is one of Taylor’s conceptual attempts to reframe the Cartesian distinctions; it’s a little bit subjective, a little bit objective, and a little bit rock and roll. 

By focusing on this interspace between subject and object, Taylor hopes to highlight the full range of sensory information that can factor into a worldview, such as the “way we respond or react or feel before the object.” From the Cartesian standpoint, such information may seem extraneous, casting a subjective cloud over objective clarity, but Taylor argues this “sharp dualist divide is not true to experience, to what it is to live in the world.”     

In the account offered in Cosmic Connections, poetry is supposed to enable the formation of a unique kind of human solidarity. In a reading of Baudelaire that goes against the traditional grain of seeing his as the poetry of solitude and spleen, Taylor suggests how this solidarity may be formed. 

Inspired by Baudelaire’s famous poem “Le Cygne” (the Swan), Taylor writes about “deep time.” Deep time’s pattern is “not imposed by a controlling consciousness”—that is, the scientific, Cartesian mind—but allowed to “emerg[e] from the moments … themselves.” The phenomenological experience of time as a basic condition of human life “creates a kind of objective solidarity, not grounded in a common will, but in a deeply felt common suffering. The sense of solidarity is realized in the poem … Such poetry records a common heritage of humanity.” 

Baudelaire is an especially interesting linchpin, because Baudelaire’s work is typically known for its lauding of the flaneur and its use of the “bizarre, violent, excessive” in order to meet a sense of a loss of meaning that amounts to an inner abyss.      

If we cannot read Baudelaire how Taylor wants us to, the risk is that the self-expressive creative individual (who bears a remarkable resemblance to the ironist in Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity) becomes the status quo, and we are left with a crowd of navel-gazing creative individuals, all determined to be exceptional, unable to see each other, and therefore unable to fully see themselves. 

Taylor well knows the risk of this kind of freedom in the political realm: “Just enlarging the freedom of the individual, unconnected to a deepening of human solidarity, can produce the self-satisfied outlook of neoliberalism and meritocracy which is threatening the very existence of modern democracy.”      

But it is not clear whether Taylor understands the risk of that kind of freedom in the aesthetic realm. He hopes that poetry can create connections between people based on a recognition of our common human disposition on earth.            

In the final section of Cosmic Connections, Taylor turns from poetry to address what must be the case, if a sweeping claim made by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz—that the “poetic act both anticipates the future and speeds its coming”—is to make sense. Taylor interprets Miłosz’s claim to mean that the future must “contain something better,” and then explores whether this picture of ethical growth can be true. 

To meet the demands of our violently fragmented political moment, Taylor gives a compelling case for the need for a deep, unprecedented reconciliation as a necessary condition for solidarity: To finally “lay down the burden of hatred,” as the civil rights activist John Lewis famously urged, requires what Taylor calls “ethical discernment,” saying that “to build this insight into a democratic society’s self-understanding takes this insight further, beyond the enlightened views of some individuals, into the collective awareness of the community. This would be something new in human history.” 

These are the high stakes of Taylor’s account of poetry; the insights of ethical discernment must come in part from how we truthfully articulate who we are in the world. 

But is drawing on Romanticism’s bequest, with its emphasis on the individual and its dregs of inward spirituality, the right model for reconciliation? Can Romanticism offer solidarity or merely being together in our isolation? Or is something more radical required? 

If a Romanticism that focuses on individual expression of inward feeling leaves us forgetful of how deeply other people shape our sense of self, it could be that what Taylor assumes about the creative process that made this poetry possible is partly what creates disconnection in the first place.

Consider, for instance, an episode in Miranda July’s novel All Fours. While on tour for her new book, which stars a protagonist who has written about her personal crisis, the narrator seems to achieve a modicum of enchantment with the world while viewing a dance performance: “Gratitude came like a punch in the gut and because it’s always such a relief not to be an asshole after all, tears streamed down my cheeks.” The experience appears to deepen: “I looked out at the circle of faces and saw that every single audience member was going through some version of my revelation, some reckoning with the self they had been carrying around until now.” The character seems to view this as a reconciliation of what she had claimed at the height of her crisis: “Having seen myself, I could no longer be myself.” 

But what appears to be revelatory reconciliation could also reveal a tragic limitation of Romanticism’s bequest. Instead of feeling a sense of togetherness that transgresses the notion of the self altogether, the protagonist can only observe and assume that the effect of the performance on her is the same as others. Such a connection may be too fleeting and too uncertain to stand up to a Cartesian skeptic. Moreover, it remains a question whether being able to be oneself, whatever that may mean, can bootstrap into the solidarity we need to meet our current and catastrophic global disposition. On this picture, left only with an individualistic conception of our inner feelings, we can only be transformed through reconciling individually with ourselves. What kind of solidarity can come from that? 

Perhaps the only kind is a solidarity of refusal: When in November 2023 the poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine resigned in response to the publication’s biased coverage of Israel’s bombardment of Palestine, she powerfully wrote that the “Israeli state’s U.S-backed war against the people of Gaza is not a war for anyone. There is no safety in it or from it, not for Israel, not for the United States or Europe, and especially not for the many Jewish people slandered by those who claim falsely to fight in their names.”

But the justification for her resignation as poetry editor betrayed the limited scope of how we have inherited Romanticism in poetry: “Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse.”

If poetry’s value lies in the individual expression of inner feeling such that, in a crisis like ours, its only form of resistance is to refuse expression altogether, something has failed. 

Is the interspace just a stopgap solution for something that demands a more radical change in how we think and speak? 

Even though Taylor wants art to reconnect us to “the natural world seen and experienced as God’s creation,” it is hard to suppress the dreadful suspicion that the larger order is one of constant war orchestrated by powers beyond the individual’s control and that, in the Anthropocene, nature is neither God’s creation, nor entirely our own. 

Adam Gopnik is not worried about this at all! 

In his New Yorker review of Cosmic Connections, Gopnik suggests that our everyday exchange with each other through technology is already a kind of enchanted interspace, and Taylor is perhaps too worried about disconnection: “The experiences Taylor evokes of being overwhelmed by aesthetic responses scarcely distinguishable from ethical elevation are ones we encounter daily—exploring a stranger’s playlist of Chuck Berry and his precursors, reading a newly sent poem, or seeing an Instagram Story of children in a distant land sharing a meal.”

Gopnik’s anodyne examples keep him from understanding the deep problem of solidarity that Taylor’s book explores.       

Still, we may not need enchantment to achieve solidarity, even on Taylor’s own terms. 

He could have taken a shorter route, carrying less Romantic baggage, to connect poetry to the shared ethical discernment necessary for solidarity. From his earlier work, A Language Animal, Taylor might have cast poetry not as valuable because of its ability to express the deep feeling of the individual, but as an extension of how we initially learned language from other people as children, that original togetherness that first brought us into the world and its articulation. 

The Romantic quest for the cosmic tends to obscure the domestic, that scene of pointing and naming and lovingly correcting. Once we remove a yearning for the cosmic, we can see that all we have—all we have always had—is each other.