A Poetical Imaginary for our Time: Charles Taylor’s cosmic connections

Abstract In his most recent engagement with the philosophy of language— Cosmic Connections —Charles Taylor charts a poetic journey through early romanticism to our present time. In this companion piece to his earlier work, The Language Animal , Taylor traces the movement of key 19th and 20th century poets from the pain of disenchantment to new possibilities of reenchantment—or what he calls re-connection. This essay follows Taylor’s hermeneutic itinerary through some of the greatest poets of modern Western literature, culminating with a plea for a new poetical imaginary for our ecological times.