Virtually no verse survives of the semi-mythic ancient Greek poet Aristeas. No complete elegies or epigrams, odes or lyrics endures, yet the breath of this forgotten figure animates all of poetic history, so that his unrecognized epic is composed of the words of Homer and Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare, Whitman and Dickinson, Neruda and Akhmatova. While there are a handful of glosses concerning the works attributed to Aristeas, his name is mostly associated with the wonder-working he was capable of, a man who was able to resurrect himself, transform himself into a bird, or transmigrate his soul from the prison of the frail human body. Unlike Orpheus, who was most certainly entirely mythological, Aristeas (or someone of his name) most likely was alive at some point seven centuries before the Common Era in Asia Minor, though whether or not he was capable of miracles beyond versification is a matter of some faith. “Often, I ween to the Gods are their hands upraised on high,” writes Aristeas in one of six extant lines as preserved by the first-century Roman literary critic Longinus, “And with hearts in misery heavenward-lifted in prayer do they cry.”

Supposedly excerpted from an otherwise completely lost epic about a Hyperborean tribe, Aristeas – that man capable of propelling his soul from his body – might be describing his own strange talents, of how supplicating prayer is so like poetry, of how verse itself might liberate us from the miseries that necessitate our keening. “A marvel exceeding great is this withal to my soul,” says the ghost of Aristeas, and indeed. Aristeas is the primogeniture of poetry’s history because his fractured biography fully unifies transcendence and immanence while taking care to separate matter from spirit. It’s an elucidation of poetry’s original purpose, that physical and rhythmic form based on breath and pause, heartbeat and foot-tapping, but which sings of such otherworldly things, as if our souls were as capable of flight as was Aristeas. The Greek poet doesn’t appear in Charles Taylor new book Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, that study being with far-later poets, but Aristeas is in some ways a convenient symbol for the Canadian scholar’s project of examining verse in our post-modern age as a means to “joy, significance, inspiration.”

Arguably the most significant Canadian philosopher since Marshall McLuhan (whom he doesn’t resemble) or Northrop Frye (whom he does), Taylor has taken as his career-spanning project an attempt to resuscitate the eighteenth and nineteenth-century German idealists in an academic culture still enraptured to the parched positivism of Anglo-American analytical thought. Taylor’s magnum opus A Secular Age, released seventeen years ago, took to answering how we moved from a “society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer,” becomes a matter of willful choice. By breathing new life into the century-old arguments of sociologists and philosophers such as Max Weber and Friedrich Schiller, Taylor made the concept of there being a historical “disenchantment” as culture shifted from faith to empiricism respectable again, a means of diagnosing the ills of contemporary society, from the instrumentalization of humanity to the fractured atomization of the individual, or as he writes, how we inherited a “widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.”

A Secular Age was Taylor’s diagnosis, but in Cosmic Connections he offers a prescription. Across almost six-hundred pages Taylor presents an erudite compendium of arguments and close readings, but many will be familiar with the rather archaic (though by no means inaccurate) form of the philosopher’s claim – that the means of connection, meaning, and transcendence in a disenchanted world must be fundamentally aesthetic, that they must be poetic. This is the ethos of the Romantic, that inchoate assemblage of British, French, American, and most of all German thinkers during the dusk of the Enlightenment and into the nineteenth-century who blanched at the soulless restrictions of rationality and sought a return to the incantatory aspects of experience, especially as mediated through art, music, poetry. At the core of the poets whom Taylor reads – Hölderlin and Novalis, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth, Baudelaire and Mallarme, and those modernist latecomers Eliot and Miłosz – he finds the “experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings; not a power over things, but one of self-realization.” The project of Cosmic Connections isn’t to “excavate,” “interrogate,” or “problematize” the Romantic creed, but rather to resurrect Goethe’s contention from The Sorrows of Young Werther that one must possess that “heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.” What Taylor is after is nothing less than transcendence – a collective transcendence. Poetry is his vehicle to get there.

For Taylor, aesthetics may be (partially) subjective, but it isn’t arbitrary. Cosmic Connections is a full-throated defense of the spiritual necessity of the arts, not as mere “cheesecake” as the neuroscientist Steven Pinker slurs it as (which the author disapprovingly quotes), but as a way of connecting to the charged nature of both reality and our fellow humans. Central to Taylor’s thought has been the distinction between the enchanted age when both immanence and transcendence were the right of all sentient beings and our current mechanistic, utilitarian, instrumental period of arid rationality. In the example of the Romantics, Taylor explicates a philosophy whereby the poetic “brings us into contact with a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken.” In this most current study – published when Taylor was 92 years old and presumably his career’s capstone – he posits the existence of something called “interspace,” a quasi-communal field between a work of art and those who receive it where meaning is generated, that quality being never entirely present in either the work or the interpreter, but between them. Maybe in keeping with the disposition of a High Church Anglican, Taylor takes a via media approach to this idea, seeing interspace as an “undistributed middle, between the ‘ontological’ and the ‘psychological,’” a type of mixture of the subjective and the objective that allow for the resurrection of an affective meaning.

Taylor’s work has always positioned itself according to this schema there is an insurmountable fissure between the enchanted and the disenchanted ages. Critics often question how useful, or even accurate, such a model happens to be. After all, there are any number of thinkers in antiquity, from Diogenes to Lucretius, who questioned the spiritual foundations of metaphysics, and by contrast there are those who even today seem capable of hearing Aristeas’ voice through the cynical dun. Even Taylor’s Romantic heroes were enraptured to the glories of scientific progress, empiricism having produced so many life-improving technologies that to cast aspersions on it can appear, even inadvertently, deeply reactionary. As a corrective to some of Taylor’s insistence on the moribund nature of contemporary life, Renee Bergland in Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Birth of Science provides an overview of an integral example of American Romanticism and her empirical enthusiasms, a poet (who as with earlier Romantics) “invoked the material world – physically real animals and air currents – in place of religious figures.”

Yet there is, even if Taylor might not necessarily agree with such a claim, a risk in taking the binary between enchantment and disenchantment too literally. What Taylor offers isn’t necessarily a historical genealogy, even if it can appear that way at times, but rather a myth as potent, useful, and beautiful as that of Aristeas. Positing that in the past y the spirits thrummed through the water and air and significance was found in the rocks and the trees involves a certain simplification to be sure. The nature of a parable, however, isn’t to be “real,” but to be true, and in that regard, Taylor offers not historiography but a potent story about meaning which is intended to orient us towards meaning. Whether or not the disenchantment hypothesis describes the actual conditions of the past (my guess would be partially), it does allow for us to justify certain aesthetic theories, modes of experience, and methods of interpretation. Perhaps that historical hypothesis is a bit of a rhetorical magic trick, but in the suspension of disbelief there can be wonders. In short, the myth of disenchantment is a lie that reveals the truth, a not un-apt summation of what poetry is as well. By yoking the idea of enchantment, disenchantment, and reenchantment to the aesthetic, Taylor provides a powerful means of justifying the artistic beyond it being mere decoration or a reflection of material conditions, but rather as the ground for a particular type of experience that first elevates the individual, and then the collective. Rather than understanding art as a mere conduit of taste, poetry is a mechanism of enchantment. “Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling,” writes Taylor, but rather it gives “access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable.” Poetry isn’t mere wallpaper to Taylor; it’s prophetic and mystical, Kabbalistic and Hermetic, Sibylline and Delphic, oracular and Orphic.

Most surprisingly, Taylor’s project isn’t meant to be removed from society, but to have estimably ethical and political implications. Even more surprisingly, after hundreds of pages talking about Neo-Romantic reenchantment, this is a progressive – even leftist – political project. Many on the left take the safety off their Brownings when they hear the word “religion,” but for Taylor something like poetic enchantment offers a cure to the epistemic crisis that authoritarianism and fascism so often presents themselves as the remedy towards. After all, at the core of Taylor’s vision is “connection,” not dominance or submission. Another word for connection, though he doesn’t use it, is solidarity, and in working together to find in expression and creativity a “source of deep fulfillment,” Taylor posits a religious (or religious-y) solution to the society of the spectacle that feeds participants the empty calories of fascism’s easy answers. None of this should be surprising – Taylor has been a progressive voice in Canadian politics for more than half-a-century, having unsuccessfully run for the House of Commons as a member of the socialist New Democratic Party four times in the 1960’s, coming in second place in the 1965 federal elections to Pierre Trudeau, future prime minister and father of the current neoliberal occupant of that office.

Today the ethos of enchantment, of orienting yourself towards something invisible but beautiful, of something transcendent but intimate, a quality as sacred as the starry firmament but as prosaic as the moral law within, has very much become the calling card of a particular type of reactionary. There is a crisis of meaning left unaddressed by liberalism; what makes Taylor so indispensable is that he’s a variety of liberal able to critique that necessary ideology without abandoning it. Fascists from Alain de Bennoit to Alexander Dugin have used enchantment as a weapon in the cause of supremacy, but Taylor is a progressive voice, a leftist thinker, and a liberal scholar who understands that the cause of enchantment is a liberatory cause, an issue of emancipation. Such is the creed of our Dickinson, that “The Brain – is wider than the Sky - / For – put them side by side - /The one the other will contain.” Shades of Taylor’s interspace there, a fusion of metaphysics and ethics, of matter and consciousness, for as Bergland notes, such verse both “celebrated the brain… [but] did not exactly deny the existence of the human soul.” Cosmic connections, if such things are possible, and I hope they are, can’t exist in an unequal, hierarchical, authoritarian society. To the contrary, what the truest Romantic art must ennoble is the wonder of the Other, of the innate divinity in our fellow humans, for as Dickinson understood, the “Brain is just the weight of God,” an egalitarian statement both in terms of politics and metaphysics.

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Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine and a contributing editor to The Montreal Review. His latest book is The Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Heavenly Virtues: A Visual History, published this month by Cernunnos/Abrams.

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