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Cosmic Connections (Work)
Taylor's 2024 turn to Romantic poetry as a resource against the disenchantment of the world — a late-career articulation of the modes of understanding that computational reason cannot replicate.
Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment (Harvard University Press, 2024) is Taylor's most recent major work and his most sustained engagement with the resources of Romantic poetry for responding to the modern condition. The book argues that Romantic poetry preserves modes of understanding — what Taylor calls the constitutive function of language — that the dominant Enlightenment tradition marginalized and that computational models of mind cannot replicate. The turn to poetry is not escapism but retrieval: a recovery of the specific capacity of language to bring reality into being through the act of articulation rather than merely describing a pre-existing world.
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The book extends Taylor's lifelong engagement with the German Romantic and hermeneutic traditions into an explicit encounter with the work of Wordsworth, Hölderlin, Novalis, Baudelaire, Rilke, and Eliot. Taylor argues that the Romantic poets developed and preserved a mode of understanding that modernity has largely lost — a mode in which language does not