Cosmic Connections

A wonderful demonstration of the power of literature to make us think and feel. -- Adam Kirsch * New York Review of Books *
An immensely ambitious book…an extraordinarily original, ambitious, and erudite effort to excavate the roots of Romanticism and place it in a new and vital relation with the rest of Western (and not solely Western) culture…a cosmic achievement. -- George Scialabba * Commonweal *
Ostensibly a study of Romantic poetry and music, [this book] is about nothing less than modern life and its discontents, and how we might transcend them. -- Adam Gopnik * New Yorker *
Monumental…the whole work is nothing if not tantalizing. On page after page are telling phrases and casually dropped insights, reminding us of Taylor’s intellection freshness and penetration…a book of spacious horizons, deep insight, [and] characteristically generous engagement. -- Rowan Williams * First Things *
A grand statement of his lifelong conviction that words are not counters for the exchange of information but are valuable only when they express and shape what we mean and what we value. They should connect us to one another, if not perhaps to the cosmos. Cosmic Connections appears just as gloom is mounting about the commercialized automation of writing, the degradation of political language, and the disintegration of social cohesion. It invites us to consider these pressing evils as connected and to resist them by drawing upon literature to refresh our own speech. -- Michael Ledger-Lomas * Literary Review of Canada *
Taylor is a perceptive reader of his poets, and he offers a wonderful synthesis of how poets from the Romantics onward have sought to overcome the ‘disenchanted’ vision of reality…he calls our attention to a way of understanding the Romantic age that makes it appear lively, salient, and worthy of the reader’s contemplation. -- James Matthew Wilson * National Review *
Taylor shows how…poetry…puts readers in contact with experiences of divine harmony, of supernatural order, of a joy which is the direct result of a situated haecceity, which is to say, of the thisness of poetic experience…[this book] dares to treat poetic language as a unique category of communication unto itself that is as distinct as it is elusive to the understanding. -- Matthew Hunter * Chronicle of Higher Education *
[Taylor’s] working theory seems to be that he has found in the poetics of cosmic connection a deep sense of significance, and he wants for us to find it too. Despite the different underlying stories, the endlessly diverging and never resolving meanings and symbols and significations, he finds that poetry still calls to him, still makes claims on him that are definite in their effect if not in their propositional content. Why should that be the case, for him or for anyone else? What is it that keeps drawing us back to these wells? This book is his answer. -- Jeff Reimer * The Bulwark *
A return to form for Taylor…a worthy milestone in an extraordinary career. -- Stevan Veljkovic * European Journal of Social Theory *
At once a meticulously precise examination of Romantic and post-Romantic poetry and, more ambitiously, an urgent call for what we might refer to as ‘poetic realism.’ -- Tara Isabella Burton * The Dispatch *
Demonstrates awe-inspiring range and a fundamental belief in the power of art…a broad-ranging, occasionally startling, and often moving book…beautifully argued [and] lovingly rendered. -- Mischa Willett * Gospel Coalition *
A labor of love…a worthy swan song. -- Matt McManus * Christian Socialism *