Charles Taylor is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. Author of The Language Animal, Sources of the Self, The Ethics of Authenticity, and A Secular Age, he has received many honors, including the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize, and membership in the Order 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 *