Taylor’s analysis of this point is deeply existential. As he puts it, while the world is disenchanted for “us moderns,” we nonetheless also experience a sense of loss and malaise in the wake of such disenchantment (p. 302). As I noted in the introduction, I think one can feel such cross-pressures in the fiction of David Foster Wallace. One might feel something similar in the poetry of Mary Oliver — whose popularity probably owes less to the intrinsic merit of her poetry and more to her ability to give voice to this feeling of cross-pressure shared by so many.
