Cosmic Connections

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 * 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 * 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 *