In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that we are by nature imitators. Poetry, as atype of imitation,gives pleasure because by it, says Aristotle, we “come to understand and work out what each thing is.” Charles Taylor—one of the preeminent living philosophers—does not think Aristotle’s poetics viable in modernity, an age of self-creation.

　　The 92-year-old Canadian is a specialist in hefty books. His latest is the 600-page Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment in which he addresses a predicament. In the world’s great myths and fairy tales, human meaning is entwined with natural order. However, we modern folk are thrilled with our personal sense of self, which is freely built from resources offered by science and technology. We began to disconnect from nature in the Enlightenment. An illustration is our relationship to Jane Austen’s pastoralism. TV and film adaptations of her novels abound, and fans leave cities to gather for cosplay in picturesque English villages. Taylor points out that Austen’s novels rested upon a value framework evident to her contemporaries. Beloved today, these novels are nostalgia. For even as Austen (1775–1817) wrote, Enlightenment science was eroding her “steadying framework.” Modern science disaggregates, and the “cosmos” has been reduced to mere matter in motion, indifferent to us; whatever “order” we might perceive there is, in truth, a subjective gloss on haphazard interaction amongst atoms. Taylor turns to poetry because deep into modernity poets strove to remain connected with natural order. Cosmic Connections is a lamentation because he acknowledges that even poetry has mostly stopped expressing knowledge about the world.

　　The “naturalist Enlightenment,” as Taylor calls it, is alienating and provokesdisenchantment: “The last three centuries in Western civilization have seen a long slide toward an increasing focus on the bare materiality of things. This is what sapped the earlier belief in cosmic order, to which the Romantic invocation of order” responds. In his telling, Romanticism was an admirable rearguard action of enchantment. The Romantics, he says, “generate a powerful experiential sense of cosmic order but stop short of affirming the reality of these orders in the objective world beyond human experience.” Though “they yearned for reunion” with the cosmos, Romantic poetry signals an “epistemic retreat” from the world. The disabusing weight of Enlightenment science was simply too much. In consequence, the self is our orbit, not the globe.

　　Nonetheless, Romanticism is evidence that there is a permanent “human need for cosmic connection”; more, a desire to experience the world “with joy, significance, inspiration.” What then is our fate, we moderns? Taylor goes against the grain of many, proposing that we cannot have it all. Though we grimly understand “our present ecological visions of an ever-changing (and now threatened) planetary Nature,” our modern poetics of free self-discovery wins out.Taylor seems caught between lamenting and celebrating this fact.

　　Taylor stresses the poetics of liberty, but I could find no matching emphasis on law in his pages. Rather than cosmic connections, it seems the upshot of Romantic poetry and its legacy is diffident connections. We can imagine Aristotle anxious to know: if nature is foreclosed as a model, who or what do we moderns imitate? Cosmic Connections concludes with the assurance that modern poetics means we have “deeper ethical insights” than earlier peoples but if liberty is imagined absent rule of law, I am not sure Taylor’s confidence is warranted.

　　Romanticism

　　Disenchantment “produced an obtuseness, a blindness, which prevents us from asking questions whose answers are crucial to our self-understanding as humans.” The consolation for our lack of understanding is freedom: “Humans have to take the initiative themselves to find and define their basic goals rather than simply reading them off some larger authoritative social or cosmic order.” Romanticism is Janus-faced. Wanting union with nature, yet only able to offer “symbolic access,” the Romantic poets represent a “new anthropology of serial self-discovery” and “we today are living a continuation of the shift they brought about.” The evidence suggeststhat identity today isthe core moral, educational, and political issue. Much of politics revolves around the widespread but controversial expectation that others have a duty to ratify “the landmarks in my moral horizon which guide me in my important choices.”

　　Cosmic Connections relays this shift through chunks of Romantic and Post-Romantic poetry interspersed with commentary. In the Middle Ages, St. Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, spoke of the cosmos as filled with vestigia, God’s footprints. St. Thomas Aquinas believed “the whole community of the universe is governed by Divine Reason.” Much early Romanticism returned to the Gothic for inspiration. A sense of cosmic unity is evident in William Wordsworth’s (1770–1850), “Tintern Abbey”:

　　A motion and a spirit, that impels

　　All thinking things, all objects of thought,

　　And rolls through all things.

　　German poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) adds to Wordsworth’s metaphysical unity a warm intimacy between the human and divine:

　　For the Heavenly like to repose on a human heart that can feel them

　　If the “naturalist Enlightenment” bespoke disaggregation, John Keats (1795–1821) resisted, finding friendship in nature:

　　Wherewith the seasonable month endows

　　The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;

　　White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;

　　Fast-fading violets cover’d up in leaves;

　　And mid-May’s eldest child.

　　The coming musk-rose

　　Taylor’s hypothesis is “that the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history, but that the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history.” In consequence, as doors to connection close, others open. The English Jesuit, Gerald Manly Hopkins (1844–89) posits “a new laying bare of an interiority in things”:

　　Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

　　Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

　　Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

　　Crying What I do is me; for that I came.

　　Hopkins was likely the last great example of Aristotelian poetics. It is unsurprising that a Victorian Jesuit was still inspired by the sacramental idea of the potentia obedientialis running through all creation. However, it is probable that the emphasis in Romanticism always lies elsewhere.

　　The Critics

　　Taylor quotes Wordsworth’s Prelude:

　　The mind is lord and master—outward sense

　　The obedient servant of her will

　　These lines put in doubt the sincerity of the Romantics’ effort to reach out towards a preformed order waiting for us. He also quotes the German aristocrat and polymath, Novalis (1772–1801):

　　For is the whole universe not in us? We don’t know the depths of our spirit

　　Inward goes the way full of mystery.

　　In us, or nowhere

　　Is eternity with its worlds—the past and the future

　　I wish Taylor had spent some time with other prominent commentators on Romanticism, because, dwelling on passages like these, the critics argue that the Romantics were always self-absorbed. In his 1919 Political Romanticism, Carl Schmitt argues that at best the world figured as an “elastic point” for the self-creation of the Romantic poets who celebrated the “marvelous flower” of their own imaginations. Insightfully, and a point to which I return below, he points out there is a reason “why there is neither a romantic law nor a romantic ethics.” A thinker otherwise opposite to Schmitt, Albert Camus concurs. In his 1951 The Rebel, Camus argues that Romanticism was Dandyism, an indulgent spectacle of the self. He cautions that “Romanticism, at the source of its inspiration, is chiefly concerned with defying moral and divine law.” It is noticeable that even when Taylor speaks of the Romantic desire for cosmic connection the character of that connection is left vague. For example, Hopkins defers to nature, whilst Novalis thinks he is its pivot.

　　For those who love Taylor Swift, Camus’s next formulation of the Dandy will ring a bell. The Dandy, says Camus, “puts on mourning and exhibits itself for public admiration.” Romanticism, he contends, celebrates magnificent singularity. The root of Swift’s business empire is that she has monetized the parasocial relationship her fans have with her emotional biography. Here are the first stanzas of her acclaimed song, the lakes:

　　Is it romantic how all my elegies eulogize me?

　　Im not cut out for all these cynical clones

　　These hunters with cell phones

　　Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die

　　I dont belong, and my beloved, neither do you

　　Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry

　　Im setting off, but not without my muse

　　What should be over burrowed under my skin

　　In heart-stopping waves of hurt

　　Ive come too far to watch some namedropping sleaze

　　Tell me what are my words worth

　　Wordsworth, of course, is synonymous with Lake Windermere at the heart of the uber Romantic Lake District in the north of England. On the one hand, the phenom that is Taylor Swift makes vivid Charles Taylor’s point—our self-understanding is wrapped up with the Romantics. On the other hand, she confirms Camus’s point—her public suffering has, with brilliant exposition and deft management of her journey of self-creation (the Eras Tour!), made her a global superstar, perhaps one unparalleled in history. Aristotle and Camus want to know whether the lakes is about Longsleddale and Tarn Crag or Taytay’s emotional terrain.

　　Post-Romanticism

　　Taylor argues that Post-Romantic poetry is less about nature and more about what he calls “higher times.” Late nineteenth-century science and history revealing “the vast and cataclysmic history of our universe, undercutting any sense of continuing (spatial) orders,” poetry began to stress novelty. In search of new beginnings, Charles Baudelaire (1821–67):

　　It’s time. Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!

　　This country bores us, O Death! Let’s set sail!

　　if now the sky and sea are black as ink

　　our hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.

　　Only when we drink poison are we well—

　　We want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,

　　To drown in the abyss—heaven or hell,

　　Who cares? Through the unknown, we’ll find the new.

　　The opportunity for unprecedented times opened, because God was dead. The Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926):

　　You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the long night

　　I rouse you with my loud pounding,

　　It’s only that I so seldom hear you breathing

　　And I know: you’re in that huge room alone

　　In consequence, Symbolism—especially prominent in France and Russia towards the end of the nineteenth century—heralded a “full-scale epistemic retreat.” Keats’ “the coming musk-rose” was replaced by jarring artifice. Symbolist poet, the Irishman W. B. Yeats (1865–1939):

　　Locke fell into a swoon;

　　The garden died;

　　God took the spinning jenny

　　Out of his side

　　The Anglo-American, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was less intimate with nature than Keats. Though influenced by the Gothic and Hopkins’ Aristotelianism, T. S. Eliot is more knowing:

　　The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,

　　And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses

　　Had the look of flowers that are looked at

　　Roses may bloom but only because the modern self is watching. God’s nature is monistically tied to man’s historical consciousness. Hence Eliot’s blending Christianity with national conservatism. His 1942 “Little Gidding” runs:

　　A people without history

　　Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

　　Of timeless moments. So while the light fails

　　On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel

　　History is now and England

　　With Romantic poetry and its legacy, thoughts of the cosmos at best findtheirseat at the table thanks to human history.

　　Liberty Without Law

　　For the Romantic, the top note is human self-creation and not anything like the potentia obedientialis.

　　Taylor chides the hard-nosed reductive types you frequently find in universities for thinking that what is meaningful is only what matches our scientific verification standard. Poetry conveys, he is sure, “essential human meanings,” its “historically evolving intuitions correspond to something real.”

　　However, Taylor himself stops well short of cosmic connections. Whilst he notes that in Aristotle “human form [comes with] a set of innate goals” and that St. Paul spoke of creation groaning for completion in peace, he cautions, “I am not proposing to go this far.” A Roman Catholic, Taylor must be aware of Catholicism’s defence of cosmic connections, specifically itslinking cosmos and law. Given Taylor’s problem set, working within the natural law tradition seems an obvious route for him, yet it is one not taken, as predicted by Schmitt a century ago when he observed, “There is neither a romantic law nor a romantic ethics.” Taylor cites Pope Francis on the “law of exstasis,” but in his gloss, this law amounts to no more than “realizing more fully our humanity through contact and exchange with people beyond our original comfort zone.” By contrast, Francis makes the “law of exstasis” metaphysical, a way to articulate the natural law’s movement from particularist loyalties to general benevolence.

　　In the debate between ancient and modern poetics, those who cherish self-discovery and a liberal accounting of law will want to turn to the resources offered by Aristotle’s imitation and Bonaventure’s vestigia.