What Happened to Bold Street?

Bold Street was once one of Liverpool’s eclectic shopping streets, where independent retailers with a creative spirit thrived. Now, those independent outlets have been drowned out by an avalanche of expensive bars and chain cafés, most with outside seating that takes up large areas of pedestrian walking space.

Streets evolve, of course, but the issue is not whether shop units are full, it’s what replaces long-standing independents, and how that changes the street’s role in civic and cultural life. A full street isn’t automatically a healthy street if the mix of uses narrows and public space becomes more privatised.

One of the casualties of this shift was Rennies Arts & Crafts, which traded on Bold Street for 42 years before closing. Its departure was described on Facebook as a “huge wrench”, a sentiment shared by many who valued the knowledge, artistry and sense of place that such businesses brought. While a few independents, like the radical bookshop News from Nowhere, still survive, they are increasingly surrounded by drink-led businesses charging inflated prices for pints.

Supporters of the changes point to the street’s current bustle and cosmopolitan food scene as proof of success. Or that independents can simply move elsewhere, to side streets or cheaper areas. But a street can be bustling and still lose cultural variety. And while relocation might keep them alive, it strips them of the visibility and civic presence they had in the city centre.

This transformation has prompted considerable debate, with news articles and social media posts questioning whether Bold Street is reinventing itself or simply succumbing to corporate homogeneity. For many, the answer seems to be the latter. This concern is not simple nostalgia, but about the erosion of the unique character, local knowledge and artistry that independent businesses like Rennies provided.

Plans to breathe new life into the area seem to have been ignored. One online forum comment suggested that the potential of Bold Street is being wasted, and called for pedestrianisation, public seating, art installations and tree-lined thoroughfares to be established in it; and expressed frustration regarding the licences issued by the council, which reportedly enable an “army” of street charity collectors to harass passersby.

Meanwhile, the prominent Lyceum building, originally built in 1802 as England’s first subscription library, is symbolic of this lost ambition. It was once a respected public space, but now houses a restaurant offshoot and a mini-golf-bar hybrid, showing no signs of genuine mixed-use or civic engagement.

Liverpool has shown in other places (from its markets to its creative districts) that economic vitality and cultural richness can co-exist. Bold Street could embody that balance again, if planning and licensing decisions made space for more than just the most profitable retailers. 

Bold Street now stands at a crossroads in its long and respected history. It is no longer the thriving, imaginative place it once was, yet it still clings to remnants of its past. The shift from independent enterprise to corporate hospitality has blunted its creative edge, replacing character with commercial blandness. Unless the city takes meaningful steps to prioritise cultural preservation, public space and genuine community use, Bold Street risks becoming just another generic high street.

‘James Bond’s Journey From Eon to Amazon’ by Rob Miller—guest blogger

The James Bond franchise has long been seen as a cinematic institution, with its identity shaped for over six decades by Eon Productions and the Broccoli family. And the series has been carefully stewarded to maintain a distinctive creative vision.

Since 1962, Eon had a unique contractual position within the Bond universe. While companies like United Artists and MGM oversaw financing and distribution, Eon retained final say over creative elements, such as: casting, directors, scripts and tone. This structure helped ensure that every Bond film reflected the Broccoli family's artistic values, even though they did not fully own the rights.

When Amazon acquired MGM in 2022, it took over the financial and distribution infrastructure surrounding Bond. The dissolution of United Artists Releasing (the distribution entity that worked closely with Eon) signalled a shift, centralising oversight under Amazon MGM Studios.

These developments and the cumulative effect of structural changes and new appointments has led to widespread speculation that Eon’s traditional creative authority may be eroding.

For fans, this has caused concern. The Broccoli family’s careful custodianship has long been credited with preserving Bond’s identity across generations. With Amazon now guiding the franchise’s future, some worry that Bond may be repositioned as part of a broader content strategy; potentially emphasising commercial output, brand integration and streaming synergy over the artistic continuity that defined the series.

Such shifts are not unique to Bond. Across the industry, large corporations are increasingly acquiring legacy creative properties and reshaping them to conform with new business models. In this context, Amazon’s handling of Bond is seen by many as a prominent example of how ownership changes can lead to subtle but significant alterations in creative direction.

While all of this may be within legal bounds, the ethical and artistic implications are more ambiguous. As Bond moves into a new era, questions remain about how much of its essence will travel with it, and whether its future will be driven by vision or volume.

'GB News Overrates its Ratings' by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

GB News is claiming a "seismic moment" in British broadcasting. Why? Because in July 2025, it barely managed to edge past the BBC News Channel in average daily viewership. But behind the chest-thumping, the reality is far less impressive, and far more revealing.

According to BARB, GB News averaged around 80,600 daily viewers last month, edging just ahead of the BBC News Channel’s 78,700. That’s a lead of fewer than 2,000 people. GB News has also announced strong performance in key time slots like breakfast and weekday evenings, framing it as a transformative moment in UK broadcasting. But dominating a few hours in the day on a low-reach channel like GB News doesn’t make it a media powerhouse—it simply confirms its status as a niche outlet with a loyal, if limited, audience.

GB News has always styled itself as the underdog ("the channel for people who feel unheard") but what it really offers is a steady diet of manufactured grievance and culture war talking points. If it’s drawing in viewers, it’s not because of journalistic rigour. It’s because it knows how to serve outrage with breakfast and paranoia with the evening headlines.

And yet even within its own narrow definition of success, the victory is hollow. When we look at the broader picture, the BBC remains overwhelmingly dominant.

GB News might have edged a daily average, but the BBC News Channel’s weekly reach still far exceeds it—often more than double. That means more people across the UK are watching the BBC, even if only briefly, while GB News relies on a smaller base of habitual viewers. That is not really growth, but more like saturation.

Then there’s the rest of the BBC's output, which dwarfs anything GB News could hope to match. BBC One’s Breakfast, Six O’Clock News and Ten O’Clock News still reach massive audiences. None of those numbers are included in the News Channel’s BARB figures. And that’s before we even include iPlayer and the BBC’s website and app, which together draw more than 40 million users. GB News online just draws over 10 million.

And radio? The BBC’s network of national and regional stations delivers news to millions more every day. GB News, by contrast, doesn’t even try.

So GB News, despite its claims of speaking for "the people", still trails badly in that department. You can game viewing figures for a time, especially when your programming verges on the sensational, but you can't manufacture credibility.

If anything, this supposed breakthrough shows the limits of GB News. It’s carved out a niche. That’s all. A vocal, partisan slice of the public is watching more intently, but that doesn't mean the channel is reshaping British media. It means it's doubling down on its core audience while alienating the rest.

So despite all the noise GB News makes, it’s still playing catch-up.

Is Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle Losing Its Soul?

Once a forgotten patch of derelict warehouses and post-industrial decay, the Baltic Triangle in Liverpool rose like a phoenix from the docklands’ ashes to become one of the city’s most celebrated cultural and creative districts. Artists, designers, musicians, tech start-ups and independent businesses found a home there, giving the area a reputation not just for reinvention but for authenticity.

In 2025, however, some are asking whether the Triangle is still a haven for creative independence or whether it has become a lifestyle brand for a different kind of consumer. Creative independence isn’t just a nice phrase. It means people having the space to experiment, take risks and shape the character of a place from the ground up—without being priced out or reduced to background decoration for someone else’s marketing campaign. The Baltic once offered that: messy, yes, but alive in a way that didn’t revolve around selling a curated “experience” to outsiders.

The Triangle’s early appeal lay in its rough edges. You could host a club night in a disused garage or start a street-food pop-up without crippling rents. Venues like Camp and Furnace, 24 Kitchen Street and the Baltic Market reflected that DIY ethos, and the art spilled onto the streets in murals and graffiti. No one is arguing the area should stay locked in romanticised dereliction. Investment has always been part of the story: from European funding that seeded Baltic Creative CIC, to private ventures that brought in new businesses and infrastructure. Growth is necessary. But there’s a difference between growth that builds on grassroots culture and growth that displaces it.

As the Triangle’s profile rose, it drew developers, investors and a wave of affluent newcomers. New apartment blocks appeared, workspace rents rose, and in some cases, the culture that made the area attractive began to be flattened into a branding tool. This is the familiar pattern seen in Shoreditch, Manchester’s Northern Quarter, Berlin’s Kreuzberg and beyond: artists create the buzz—the buzz attracts capital—the capital remakes the place—the artists leave. Polish isn’t the problem. But when “polish” comes at the cost of affordability, spontaneity and space for experimentation, a district risks becoming efficient but hollow: a place to consume, not create.

A city that balances growth with cultural depth and local input can produce something far more lasting. This doesn’t mean endless committees or blocking development until nothing happens. It means deliberate consultation with local creatives, residents and businesses so new projects respond to real needs; whether that’s workspace that stays affordable, public areas genuinely open for community use, or housing that offers a mix of price points, not just high-yield apartments. Liverpool has done this before. Baltic Creative CIC showed how targeted investment, combined with local initiative, can turn a neglected area into a thriving hub. The challenge now is to keep space in the Triangle for grassroots energy, not just as a starter phase before the next upgrade, but as a permanent part of the city’s DNA.

The Baltic Triangle still has genuinely independent spaces, but its future isn’t guaranteed. If it evolves into just another polished playground for rich digital nomads and cocktail tourists, it will have lost not only its edge but also its meaning. The question isn’t whether the Baltic should grow, it’s whether that growth will leave room for the kind of creative independence that made it matter in the first place.

Whatever Happened to the Tramp?

When I was a teenager in the late 1970s, tramps were a familiar sight. They nearly always dressed in the same “uniform”: a long, shabby overcoat with string-tied boots and a straggly beard. Yes… I know that sounds like a stereotype—but I saw them dressed like this.

They could usually be seen either sleeping on park benches or gathered in groups chatting and drinking on the steps of disused buildings etc.

They weren’t homeless in the modern sense of systemic failure and desperation, but part of a now extinct subculture, with its own unspoken rules.

The word “tramp” has largely vanished from modern vocabulary. We now speak of the “homeless”, a term that covers a wide and shifting range of circumstances: people living in tents, hostels, cars or sofa-surfing. Many are young (under 40), affected by addiction, mental health issues or a system that has failed them. They are often seen sitting outside banks or in sleeping bags in shop doorways. But they are not tramps, not in the older sense.

“Tramping” was a way of life: itinerant, solitary and based on a sort of freedom. The tramp of old was usually an older man (though a few women tramps did exist), sometimes an ex-soldier or labourer, who had dropped out of ordinary life through choice.

He would sleep most nights in the “spike”: the local workhouse-style “doss house”, where you were allowed a bed for one night in exchange for chores. George Orwell wrote about spikes in Down and Out in Paris and London, describing the indignities of the places from firsthand experience.

This subculture also had its “infrastructure”. Certain cafés, park shelters, hostels, church halls and quiet parts of railway stations were its hubs. Some cities had what might be called "tramp cafés", often in poorer areas, where for a few pence you could get a mug of tea, a badly-made sandwich and sit unbothered for hours. Ralph McTell in Streets of London mentions these. There was one in Berry Street in Liverpool, that I would go to occasionally with a school friend out of a sort of fascinated curiosity.

Sometime in the 1980s, tramps vanished from our streets. One reason for this is that spikes were abolished and city centres became cleaner, more policed and more commercialised. Loitering was outlawed. And being visibly poor became unacceptable.

Another reason is that the very idea of dropping out lost its romantic cultural acceptance. The tramp of old was seen as a figure of a bygone era; romanticised in literature and folk songs as a sort of wise old philosopher. Today, the idea of living outdoors, without possessions or ambition, is no longer viewed as eccentric, but is seen as a problem to be solved.

So tramps have disappeared, not because they chose to, but because society made it impossible for them to exist.

Scents Before Modernity

I was a young child in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the world I grew up in was saturated with everyday scents that were distinctive and ever-present. These smells, like the pop music of the time, formed the background texture of my life. Most have vanished. Some for good reason: safety, health and progress. Others were lost due to modern manufacturing processes and production methods.

The most noticeable absence is tobacco smoke, especially from pipes and cigars. Those two had a richness I associated with sophistication and gentility. I don’t advocate smoking, and I’m glad it’s gone. But I miss the smell, at least from pipes and cigars. Cigarettes didn’t smell as nice.

Other scents I miss are: petrol fumes, coal fires, the smell of woollen school blazers and caps, the real leather of school satchels, chalk dust, wax crayons, freshly sharpened pencils and rubbers (erasers). Wellington boots also had a smell. So did the diesel from buses, trains and ferries. As did sweets (candy) with their variety of aromas. And bookshops smelled of paper and cardboard.

Everywhere had a smell! Now, virtually nothing has!

Clean air. Sanitised surfaces. Air-conditioned buildings that emit nothing at all. Supermarkets are scentless. Public transport provides no odour, unless something has gone wrong. Homes are heated by scentless electricity, not by gas or paraffin heaters, that had “cosy” aromas.

This isn’t just nostalgia. Something has been lost; faded away without mourning. Smell is the oldest sense we have, wired directly into memory and emotion. The scents of childhood shaped us, or they did so for me. They fashioned a world rich in texture and associations, that you carried with you. Today, we have replaced scent for sterility. 

I miss the world when it smelled of life.

‘The Poetics of Ambiguity: Romanticism, Empiricism and the Modern Mind’ - free ebook

The new ebook from Argotist Ebooks is ‘The Poetics of Ambiguity: Romanticism, Empiricism and the Modern Mind’ by Jeffrey Side.

Description: 

“This book began life as a doctoral thesis written between 2000 and 2007, a period during which I became increasingly disillusioned with the dominant aesthetic assumptions underpinning both Romantic and contemporary mainstream poetry. At the heart of my research was a single question: why did so much poetry—even that which purported to challenge cultural norms—remain epistemologically conservative? Why did it continue to treat language as a transparent medium, perception as unmediated access to reality and the self as a stable, expressive core? The answer, I gradually came to realise, lay in the unexamined legacy of empiricism. What I found in Romantic poetry—especially that of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their successors—was not the radical inwardness or imaginative freedom often celebrated in literary histories, but rather a poetics that remained fundamentally tethered to an Enlightenment faith in perception and observation. Far from breaking with empiricism, Romanticism often perpetuated its core assumptions, reconfiguring them within a poetic vocabulary that lent affective weight to what were essentially epistemological structures of the empirical gaze.” 

Available as a free ebook here: 

https://argotistebooks.blogspot.com/2025/07/the-poetics-of-ambiguity-romanticism.html

'Reassessing "The Boys from the Blackstuff" in the Context of Today’s Welfare System by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

The Boys from the Blackstuff is regarded as a landmark of 1980s British TV drama, praised for its uncompromising portrayal of unemployment and working-class hardship during the Thatcher years. The series gave a human face to the economic devastation caused by deindustrialisation and mass unemployment. Yet, in its aim to expose social suffering, it used a level of dramatic licence that sometimes overstated the harshness of the welfare system, which—compared to today's—was far less punitive, even under Thatcher.

The drama focused on unemployed Liverpool dockworkers, dealing not only with joblessness but with the loss of dignity and community. This portrayal powerfully captured the emotional and social impact of economic decline. However, it often implied that the benefits system was punitive and inadequate—an impression that doesn’t fully align with the welfare environment of the time. In reality, the system was comparatively generous and less conditional, with no strict requirement to prove active job searching in order to claim support.

While the series depicted a system that appeared harsh, the reality of the early 1980s welfare state was more complex, and, in some respects, more supportive than today’s. Contrary to the suggestion of near-total institutional indifference, claimants could access additional help beyond regular weekly payments, including for essentials like furniture and heating.

Support was available through Supplementary Benefit, the main means-tested system in place throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Under this scheme, claimants could apply for Exceptional Needs Payments to cover urgent or irregular expenses, such as beds, cookers and other basic furnishings. Those with special circumstances (such as illness, disability or caring responsibilities) could also receive Additional Requirements Allowances to help with higher living costs, including heating during colder months. Though discretionary, these payments reflected a genuine commitment to poverty relief that is largely absent from today’s system.

Claimants were required to sign on only every two weeks, with no obligation to demonstrate active job hunting. There were rules about working while claiming, but no digital surveillance, mandatory job applications or routine sanctions of the kind now embedded in the benefits system.

What the series captured with emotional force may have overstated the cruelty of the system itself. Even under the tightening social policies of the early Thatcher years, the welfare state still provided a relatively humane safety net—one that recognised need and made provision for basic dignity.

The depiction of a relentlessly harsh system overlooked this reality. Instead, the drama focused on the psychological and social fallout of unemployment, which was indeed severe and deserving of attention. Yet by conflating the trauma of joblessness with a draconian benefits regime, it contributed to the impression that state support itself was a source of suffering—something that is truer today than it was then.

The series also highlighted the risks faced by those caught “moonlighting” while on benefits: characters who took informal work to supplement their income, only to face sanctions or loss of support. While this reflected a real anxiety, the need to moonlight was arguably less about systemic cruelty and more about claimants striving to maintain self-respect and meet needs that went beyond the scope of benefits.

Compared to today's benefits climate, the contrast is striking. Modern support is far more conditional, closely monitored and punitive, with frequent assessments and sanctions that make claiming both stressful and uncertain. By contrast, the 1980s system prioritised financial support over enforcement.

In this light, The Boys from the Blackstuff was both a product and an amplifier of its time: a dramatic work that rightly spotlighted the human cost of economic upheaval, but which arguably overstated the cruelty of the benefits system. Its powerful emotional truths remain compelling, but its depiction of 1980s welfare needs historical perspective. The system it portrayed as oppressive was, in fact, a comparatively generous support network—one without which the hardship of the era would have been far worse.

Ultimately, The Boys from the Blackstuff is best appreciated not as a literal account of welfare policy, but as a dramatic exploration of the social and psychological toll of unemployment, set against the backdrop of a welfare state that, while imperfect, was more accessible than its reputation, or its screen depiction, might suggest.

The Evolution of the Western Film Score

I first came across the music of Aaron Copland in 1989. I already knew that his work had influenced the sound of Hollywood Western film scores, most notably Elmer Bernstein’s The Magnificent Seven. I had assumed Copland had been the only influence behind this kind of music. I didn’t realise that what we now think of as “Western” film music had developed over time, influenced by several composers before Hollywood adopted it as the sound of the cinematic American West.

One of those earlier composers was Ferde Grofé. His Grand Canyon Suite came out in 1931, before Copland produced a similar sound with Prairie Journal in 1937. Though not written for film, its sweeping orchestration would go on to influence Hollywood composers during the 1940s.

While Grofé wasn’t a film composer himself, his orchestrational style gave Hollywood composers new techniques for evoking the American West. This can be heard in Max Steiner’s score for They Died with Their Boots On (1941), which has strong similarities to Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite.

Before the 1940s, the Western genre had no fixed musical identity. Early Westerns relied on film orchestrations that followed general film music conventions, without any attempt to sound specifically “American” or “frontier”.

That changed with composers like Dimitri Tiomkin and Jerome Moross. Tiomkin’s scores for Red River (1948) and High Noon (1952) incorporated folk melodies, hymns, guitar and harmonica. And Moross’s score for The Big Country (1958) had a spacious feel that matched the landscape.

So far, we’ve looked at how this musical style evolved through Grofé and the film composers he influenced. Now we will look at how Copland’s music fits into this evolution.

As mentioned earlier, Copland’s first foray into the kind of sound we now associate with the American West came with Prairie Journal. While this was not written with Western tropes in mind, it used many of the musical elements (open harmonies, folk-like melodies and a sense of spaciousness) that, as we have seen, would later become associated with cinematic depictions of the American West.

The following year, Copland’s ballet, Billy the Kid (1938), marked a turning point. It used cowboy songs, square dance rhythms, and a more minimalist style of orchestration. Although it was written for the stage, it would define how the West sounded in film, especially by the 1960s, when Elmer Bernstein drew heavily on it for his score for The Magnificent Seven.

Interestingly, though Copland had written a score for the 1948 Western, The Red Pony, it had no influence on Western film music in the '40s and '50s.

What emerges, then, from this brief history is not one clear origin point for Western film music, but two separate paths developing alongside each other. One came from Grofé (lush, grand and pictorial), which dominated the Hollywood Westerns of the '40s and '50s. The other came from Copland (minimalist, folk-based and direct), which became predominant in the 1960s and thereafter.

Exposing the Flaws in the Observer’s Salt Path Critique

A recent article in The Observer called ‘The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation’ has caused some controversy. It presents a damning investigation into Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path, calling into question its truthfulness and suggesting that Winn and her husband “Moth” built their public image on a foundation of legal trouble, financial misconduct and selective storytelling.

While the article presents serious claims, and cites multiple sources to support them, its tone, framing and rhetorical style raise their own questions, about journalistic bias, assumption-laden reporting and what truth in memoir really means.

From the headline alone, the tone is set: “spun from lies, deceit and desperation”, is not neutral language. It prepares the reader for scandal before the evidence has even begun. This isn’t unusual in click-bait media, but in investigative reporting, such language can subtly (or not so subtly) shape a reader’s judgement.

Throughout the article, sources who speak critically of Winn (especially Ros Hemmings, a former employer’s widow) are presented as credible and emotionally grounded, while Winn herself is largely silent, represented only by a short legal statement. The article makes no serious attempt to balance its narrative with a fuller version of Winn’s perspective. The effect is to turn one side of a complex story into a presumed truth.

The article depends heavily on Winn’s past legal and financial troubles, most notably an alleged embezzlement case from 2008, settled out of court with a non-disclosure agreement. It’s a serious allegation, but the reporting treats this as a smoking gun that discredits The Salt Path entirely, without acknowledging that memoirs often include omission, thematic shaping and selective focus.

Similarly, the article notes that Winn and her husband owned property in France during their supposed "homelessness", and later refers to it as "uninhabitable". But this key context is folded into a paragraph mid-article, with little exploration of what "uninhabitable" actually meant in practice. The framing leans toward suspicion rather than clarity. If the property was uninhabitable in the sense that it could not be lived in, then Win and her husband were indeed homeless. The lack of clarity about this in the article, allows for the implication that they had options that they hid from readers. That might be technically true, but without examining the real condition or accessibility of that French property, the reporting veers into insinuation.

An assumption running through the article is that because Winn omitted parts of her past, she must have intended to deceive. But memoir is not autobiography. It’s an inherently selective genre, based around emotional truth and narrative arcs, not exhaustive chronology. Many people who write memoirs, write under pseudonyms, simplify time-lines, or emphasise thematic resonance over literal precision.

The article also assumes that because some readers were moved by the story, they might have acted on it in misguided ways, and that therefore Winn’s alleged misrepresentations could cause “real harm”. That claim is speculative and unsupported by evidence. It functions as a rhetorical device, not a documented consequence.

One of the strongest challenges raised in the article is over Moth’s diagnosis of corticobasal degeneration (CBD). Several neurologists are quoted expressing scepticism about the longevity and reversibility of his symptoms as portrayed in the book. Yet even here, the article admits there is nothing to disprove the diagnosis. It also acknowledges that medical anomalies do happen.

Ultimately, the article tries to draw a hard line between fact and fable in a literary form that has never been that tidy. The claim that The Salt Path misrepresents Winn’s life might have merit, but does that invalidate the emotional and symbolic journey that so many readers found meaningful?

The article suggests that Winn’s supposed deceptions disqualify her from telling a redemptive story. But that’s a moral judgement, not a literary one. The uncomfortable reality is that flawed people can write true things, and inspirational books don’t have to be written by saints. Of course, redemptive arcs can be misused or feel too convenient—but that doesn’t mean they’re always inauthentic, or that "flawed" narrators can’t earn them.

The article raises serious questions. It uncovers contradictions, omitted facts and unresolved tensions between the private past and the public story. But its tone is adversarial. 

It’s worth noting that the journalist behind the Observer piece, Chloe Hadjimatheou, was previously found by the BBC’s own Executive Complaints Unit to have breached editorial standards in a separate investigation—specifically, a 2021 Radio 4 documentary that included false claims and unsupported insinuations. The BBC later admitted the programme failed to meet its accuracy standards. Given this prior finding, it’s reasonable to approach her current reporting with caution—especially when it relies heavily on implication and selective framing.

This kind of history suggests a need for caution when weighing reporting that relies heavily on implication and selective framing.

Good journalism should probe. But when it loses sight of balance, it can resemble the thing it critiques.

‘How the UK Benefits System Became Punitive’ by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

In 1989, if you were unemployed in the UK, you were entitled to Unemployment Benefit, Income Support and Housing Benefit without being subjected to regular interrogations at the Jobcentre. Today, the welfare state looks very different. Universal Credit claimants are forced into relentless job search routines, and sanctioned often for no reason. This shift didn't happen by accident. It’s the result of a decades-long transformation—one that replaced the old welfare state with a system designed not to support the poor, but to discipline them.

The roots of today’s punitive benefits system lie in the 1980s, when the Thatcher government began framing welfare as a problem rather than a public good. The introduction of the Restart Programme (a predecessor to today's Restart Scheme) in 1986 was a significant moment. Unemployed people were summoned to interviews a couple of times a year to discuss their job prospects. In theory, if you missed one your benefit would be stopped, but this seldom happened.

This marked the beginning of what policy makers called “activation”—the idea that claimants should be prodded or pushed into work. Thatcher’s successors took this even further. Under New Labour in the late 1990s, people had to earn their benefits. The New Deal introduced under Blair linked welfare to mandatory training and job applications. Rights were increasingly tied to responsibilities.

The real transformation came after 2010, when the Coalition and Conservative governments built an entire system on coercion. Universal Credit rolled six benefits into one, but more importantly, it introduced digital control mechanisms that let the Department for Work and Pensions track claimants in real time. Under Universal Credit, you can be sanctioned for:

Missing a job centre appointment

Applying for “too few” jobs

Turning down a zero-hours contract

Not updating your journal promptly enough

A missed click or misunderstood instruction can mean weeks without income. The DWP doesn’t need to prove you’re lazy or fraudulent, they only need to catch you failing to meet their requirements. The result is a system of bureaucratic cruelty, dressed up as “encouraging independence”.

The most glaring contradiction is that all of this has happened during a period when secure, decent jobs have declined. In 1989, the UK still had large-scale manufacturing and public sector jobs. The labour market has since fractured into insecure work, gig economy scraps and stagnant wages.

And yet the benefits regime assumes there’s a job for everyone—as if full employment still exists, and the only obstacle is personal failure. It’s a fantasy. But it’s a convenient one, because it justifies cutting support while blaming the claimant.

Several forces have driven this shift:

Welfare has been reframed as a problem to be fixed rather than a right to be upheld.

Crackdowns on “scroungers” play well in the press and among older, property-owning voters.

Algorithms make it easy to track, control and punish claimants.

After 2010, slashing welfare became a core part of budget-cutting measures

Perhaps most crucially, the idea of a social contract, where the state protects the vulnerable, has eroded. In its place is a doctrine of compliance, where you have to prove your worth every week, or go without.

The UK benefits system has not failed—it has been redesigned to behave exactly as it does: to deter claims, enforce low-paid work and punish those who fall through the cracks. It’s no longer about lifting people out of poverty. It’s about managing poverty through pressure, stigma and surveillance.

And all of this in an era where there are no jobs for a large majority of the working age population.

‘A Critical Look at the Restart Scheme’s Structural Flaws’ by Andrew Davies—guest blogger

The UK government’s Restart Scheme is presented as a lifeline for long-term Universal Credit claimants, an intensive employment support programme designed to help people back into sustainable work. But behind the glossy promises of “tailored help” and “enhanced support” lies a system riddled with structural flaws. For many, Restart doesn’t feel like support, it feels like coercion dressed up as care.

Restart is framed as something that helps you, but for most claimants, it's not optional. Once a person has been on Universal Credit for six months or more, they can be referred without choice or prior agreement. Participation is backed by sanction threats: fail to engage, and you could lose some or all of your benefit.

Even the introductory “warm handover call”—which sounds friendly—is part of a formal compliance chain. It marks the beginning of a process where your cooperation is no longer simply encouraged, but expected and enforceable.

Restart isn’t delivered by Jobcentre Plus. It’s outsourced to private providers: companies that are paid by the government per referral, and can receive further payments when a claimant secures employment. This structure has built-in negative incentives.

Providers are financially rewarded for getting people through the door, not necessarily for giving them useful help. The pressure to meet performance targets can outweigh the quality or relevance of the support offered. And individual needs are often overlooked in favour of tick-box exercises, quick job placements or unsuitable training schemes. In short, profit is prioritised over people.

Claimants are often asked to sign documents like participation agreements and data consent forms. These forms are presented as routine, but they carry real consequences. The participation agreement gives the provider leverage to enforce tasks and activities (including job searches, training courses and workshops). And the data consent forms may give the provider access to share personal details with third-party organisations.

These documents are not always mandatory, but the pressure to sign is immense. Refusal can lead to friction, suspicion or implied threats of being reported as “non-compliant”. Those who exercise their right not to sign certain documents are often met with passive-aggressive resistance. While they retain legal autonomy, they may:

Face hostility or resentment from provider staff

Be treated as “problem claimants”

Have to constantly defend their position and remind staff of their rights

It creates an adversarial atmosphere where the burden is on the claimant to assert their rights repeatedly—a psychologically exhausting task, especially for those with mental health conditions.

Restart is particularly hard on people with anxiety, depression or other vulnerabilities. The scheme’s structure (regular appointments, compliance demands and the threat of sanctions) often worsens mental health rather than improving job prospects. Instead of personalised support, many claimants experience:

Micromanagement of job search activities

Inflexible scheduling

Patronising workshops

And an overwhelming sense of being watched, judged and pushed. Rather than building confidence, Restart can strip away autonomy and dignity.

Once someone is referred to Restart, they are usually on it for up to 12 months. During that time, they are expected to:

Attend multiple appointments

Complete provider-set tasks

Accept job offers, training or interviews—sometimes regardless of suitability

There is no easy way out. Requests to leave the scheme are refused—even when alternatives would be more helpful.

Despite claims of being “personalised”, Restart operates on a one-size-fits-all model. People from all backgrounds, including skilled professionals, carers, those with long-term health conditions and those already engaged in their own job-seeking strategies, are treated identically. Instead of flexibility and genuine help, the scheme offers rigidity and delivers bureaucracy, surveillance and pressure.

The structural flaws in the Restart Scheme aren’t accidental—they’re built into the foundation:

It punishes non-compliance more than it rewards effort

It treats claimants as risks to be managed, not individuals to be supported

It serves the needs of contractors and targets, not the people it claims to help

Any real solution would require more than tweaks. It would need a complete rethinking of what support for unemployed people should look like: with respect, choice and real empowerment at its heart.

People on Universal Credit deserve genuine support, not mandated compliance under threat. The Restart Scheme may work for a few, but for many, it is a source of unnecessary stress, surveillance and stigma. Until the system stops prioritising targets and payments over people, schemes like Restart will continue to fail those they claim to serve.

The Lost World Above the Liverpool Adelphi Hotel

I have lived in Liverpool all my life, and The Adelphi Hotel was once one of the city's crowning glories. I remember having tea there with my sister when we were kids, as a treat from my mum. I was awestruck by the glittering chandeliers and the ornate ceilings. It was like stepping into another world.

Around 15 years ago, I read a library book written by a former staff member of the Adelphi (I’ve forgotten the title and the author’s name). In the book, she reminisced about her time working there in the 1960s. What struck me most wasn’t just her stories of guests or the routines of hotel life, but her description of an entire hidden world above the hotel: the top floor, which comprised of staff live-in apartments. Not only that, but there was also a refectory, a TV room, a laundry and a shared lounge. Staff were also given perks like discounted train fares, due to the Adelphi being owned at the time by British Railways, which operated a number of railway hotels across the country.

When I read about all this, I was amazed, not just at the physical scale of the arrangement, but at the attitude behind it. It was a different way of treating and caring for staff: one that acknowledged their worth, not just as cheap labour (as might be the case these days), but as human beings who deserved dignity, stability and a sense of belonging. Sadly, that world is gone forever. Today, the top floor is, I understand, just storage space.

The Adelphi was not the only hotel that had staff live-in apartments. This was true of most hotels worldwide. Having staff living in hotels was more than merely being the decent thing to do, it was also the foundation of impeccable service. Staff could respond instantly to guests’ needs, ensuring that hotels maintained a high level of customer care.

Removing staff live-in apartments has forced staff into daily commuting, thus increasing stress, fatigue, staff dissatisfaction and staff turnover. 

Reinvesting in staff well-being, including reintroducing staff live-in apartments where possible (I appreciate that only the large hotels could do this), would restore some of the decency and efficiency lost in the name of false economy. Hospitality is a human business—and its foundation depends on people who feel valued, and genuinely part of the workplace they serve.

The Beautiful Contradiction at the Heart of Stevie Wonder’s Love Song

I only recently became aware of Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Believe (When I Fall in Love It Will Be Forever)’. It is a song with one of the most beautiful melodies I have ever heard, yet its lyrics, while emotionally rich, contain contradictions.

The singer’s refrain, “I believe when I fall in love with you it will be forever”, sounds like a vow from someone ready to embrace lasting love. But looked at closer, it becomes a paradox. How can someone pledge eternal devotion to a person they have not even fallen in love with yet? This assumes not only that love will happen, but that it will last forever. It is a romantic notion, certainly, but it goes beyond what is emotionally and logically plausible.

And far from being a stranger to heartache, the singer has previously known love and its painful aftermath, as seen in phrases in verse one such as "shattered dreams" and "worthless years". Having experienced such devastation from love before, what makes them certain that things will somehow be different next time?

There is also the contrast between belief and feeling. “I believe” implies conviction, but conviction alone does not generate love. Falling in love is not a choice—it happens us. It is not summoned by belief or commanded into permanence by force of will. So to promise love forever in the absence of that love is meaningless.

But perhaps I am being too pedantic, and that the contradictions are not flaws at all, but part of what gives the song its emotional power. Maybe they reflect the messy, often contradictory nature of loving again after loss: of someone trying to reconcile past pain with the determination to believe in love despite everything. And maybe that is what gives the song its power. Not the certainty, but the hope.

The Genius of ‘Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson’ by Aaron Copland

Emily Dickinson’s poetry can often seem reserved and difficult to access when just read on the page. Her writing is usually short and indirect, and sometimes seems emotionally distant. But if we look more closely, there is much going on beneath the surface. Her poems deal with major themes like nature, grief, love, death and the inner life: all explored in a very personal and introspective way.

The composer, Aaron Copland, inspired by Dickinson's poetry, created a musical setting for twelve of her poems. By doing this, he brought out the emotional intensity that might not always be obvious in the written text. Instead of making the poems more dramatic or adding lots of flourishes, He used subtle musical choices to highlight what was already there. His settings seem to “breathe” life into the words, revealing the feelings hidden within them. The result is a powerful balance between simplicity and deep emotion, where Dickinson’s careful language interacts with his expressive music.

The collection, called Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson does not follow a narrative, but the order of the pieces, nevertheless, creates a sense of emotional movement. It begins with awe at the beauty in nature, then moves into more painful subjects like loss, and ends with a quiet reflection on death. Copland never forces meaning onto the poems, instead, his music surrounds the text gently, helping the listener to hear Dickinson’s voice more clearly.

Rather than just being musical accompaniments, his settings feel like they are thinking and feeling alongside the poems, and so amplify the feeling in Dickinson’s work. He captures her mix of clarity and mystery, belief and doubt, and even the emotional tension that sometimes is just below the surface. Together, the poems and the music create something that is both intimate and powerful.

Here are a few selections from the work, with brief commentary:

‘Nature, the gentlest mother’

This opening piece sets a gentle and peaceful mood. Copland’s music helps bring out the softer, more nurturing side of Dickinson’s poem. The musical accompaniment flows calmly, and the vocal line is smooth and relaxed. This matches the poem’s idea of nature as patient and kind, even to those who do not seem to deserve it. There’s also a quiet sense of reverence, as if the music is skirting around something sacred. At the same time, the music does not ignore the slight irony in the poem: it leaves room for the listener to notice that this version of nature might be more complicated than it first appears.

‘Why do they shut me out of Heaven?’

This piece is emotional and urgent. Copland uses sudden changes in rhythm and dynamics to show the speaker’s frustration and confusion. The question in the title seems like a real cry, not just a rhetorical question. The line ‘Did I sing too loud?’ becomes an intense moment in the music, where the speaker seems to be reduced to a state of anguished vulnerability. This turns the poem from something that might seem distant or sardonic into something raw and personal. Copland makes the pain and longing in the poem feel very real.

‘Heart, we will forget him!’

This is probably the most emotional piece in the work. The poem is about trying to forget someone you loved, and Copland captures that with music that is slow, quiet and full of pauses. The voice sounds hesitant, as if the speaker is not sure she can really achieve what she is aiming at: to forget her lover. The music also seems to hold back, which adds to the feeling of sadness and inner conflict. There is a sense that though the speaker is declaring that she will forget her lover, the music suggests that forgetting is going to be much harder than she is willing to admit.

‘I felt a funeral in my brain’

This piece is unsettling and intense. The music uses sounds that mimic bells or footsteps, and the rhythms feel unstable, which matches the poem’s description of mental anguish. As the poem continues, the music becomes stranger and more disjointed, showing how the speaker is losing touch with reality. On the page, this poem can feel quite abstract or abstruse, but Copland’s music makes the experience physical and immediate. It feels like we are inside the speaker’s mind as she unravels.

‘Because I could not stop for Death’

The final piece in the work is calm and slow, with a peaceful mood. Copland does not make the idea of death frightening, but presents it as something gentle and inevitable. The steady pace of the music gives the feeling of a slow journey, which fits the poem’s description of being carried by Death in a carriage. The vocal line does not rush, and the music is soft and even. This creates a mood of acceptance rather than fear. The ending feels like a quiet conclusion, not a dramatic finish, which works well for the reflective tone of the poem.

What makes Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson so effective is that Copland does not try to make the poems overly dramatic or emotional. Instead of adding lavish musical gestures, he keeps everything simple and understated: just like Dickinson’s writing, which often says a lot with very few words. His music does not take over the poems, but gently brings out the feelings already inside them. Rather than changing Dickinson’s work, Copland seems to complete it.

An Analysis of Internal Contradictions in The Beach Boys’ ‘God Only Knows’

I was saddened to hear of the recent passing of Brian Wilson, a towering figure in pop music whose influence extends far beyond his renowned work in arrangements, harmonies and production. While not all of his lyrics were celebrated as literary masterpieces, many were marked by an honesty and heartfelt sincerity.

One of my favourite songs of his is ‘God Only Knows’, and on hearing the news of his death, I listened to it again and, for the first time, noticed a subtle yet significant contradiction in its opening verse—an observation that prompted a deeper look into the song’s lyrical complexity.

‘God Only Knows’ is widely regarded as one of the most enduring love songs in popular music. Its lyrical and musical composition has been extensively praised, yet a closer examination of the lyrics reveals subtle internal contradictions that enrich the emotional complexity of the song. These contradictions, far from detracting from the song’s impact, contribute to a nuanced exploration of love’s multifarious nature.

The song opens with a notably paradoxical statement: “I may not always love you”. This admission of potential faltering introduces an element of vulnerability that is uncommon in traditional love songs, which often prioritise unwavering devotion from the outset. However, this initial doubt is almost immediately countered by the lines: “But long as there are stars above you / You never need to doubt it / I’ll make you so sure about it”. This rapid transition from doubt to certainty creates an abrupt juxtaposition, which can be interpreted in multiple ways. It might reflect an honest acknowledgement of love’s fragility while simultaneously offering reassurance. Alternatively, the swift negation of the initial doubt could be seen as diminishing the emotional weight of vulnerability, presenting it as a mere rhetorical device rather than a genuine conflict.

This opening tension between uncertainty and assurance sets the tone for the song’s subsequent exploration of emotional dependence. The singer’s hypothetical contemplation of abandonment (“If you should ever leave me / Well, life would still go on, believe me”) introduces a pragmatic stance, recognising the inevitability of life’s continuation despite personal loss. Yet, this rational acceptance is immediately contradicted by the assertion: “The world could show nothing to me / So what good would living do me?” This contradiction mirrors the complex interplay between reason and emotion that characterises human experience. While intellectually acknowledging the persistence of life, the singer simultaneously conveys the existential emptiness wrought by separation from the beloved.

The refrain “God only knows what I’d be without you” functions as a thematic anchor, repeated throughout the song to underscore the profound dependence the singer places upon the loved one. The phrase’s ambiguity (avoiding specification of the singer’s state in the absence of the beloved) invites multiple interpretations, encompassing notions of loss, disorientation or incompleteness. This repetition serves both to emphasise devotion and to reflect the unresolved uncertainty that accompanies deep emotional attachment.

These internal contradictions, rather than detracting from the song’s coherence, serve to articulate the inherent ambivalence and complexity of love. Love is neither monolithic nor static; it encompasses doubt and certainty, hope and despair, rationality and emotionality. The song’s lyrical tensions thus mirror the lived experience of love’s contradictions, lending ‘God Only Knows’ its enduring resonance and emotional authenticity.

The internal contradictions present within ‘God Only Knows’ contribute significantly to its artistic depth. The juxtaposition of doubt and affirmation, pragmatic acceptance and emotional devastation, encapsulates the multifarious nature of human love. This nuanced portrayal transcends simplistic romantic idealisation, offering instead a rich, honest and timeless reflection on love’s profound complexities.

I can’t conclude without mentioning the excellent cover version of the song by Andy Williams, recorded in 1967. This rendition eschews the cheerful and chirpy arrangements of the original Beach Boys recording, replacing them with a concerto-like orchestral arrangement that is more reflective and mournful in mood—qualities that align well with the gravitas of the lyrics. The result is almost hymn-like in its solemnity and reverence.

Why Bad Poems Can Become Great

Having spent over 25 years studying, reading and reviewing poetry, I’ve come to the possibly heretical conclusion that it’s often the reviewer, not the poet, who creates the poem. That is, what we think of as a “great” poem (timeless, resonant, artful) is very often not born great. It’s made great. Not by revision, or hidden “genius”, but by the critic, the reader and the commentator, who view it through the right lens at the right time. Put bluntly: a poem is only as good as the reading it receives.

We tend to regard poems as self-contained artefacts, either well-made or not. But poems are not static artefacts. They are more like catalysts: incomplete until acted upon by a mind. And the mind that matters most, is often not the one that wrote the poem but the one that explains it.

Critics don’t merely assess poems, they construct the scaffolding through which we view them. They decide which ambiguities are “interesting”, which facets are “meaningful” and which prosaic lines are secretly fascinating. And over time, their interpretations become part of the poem’s DNA. The original poet might not acknowledge this, but that doesn’t matter. The poem’s real life begins after it has been written.

Many of the so-called classics of poetry began as publishing failures. Some were dismissed entirely, and others were ignored until a prescient critic found something interesting to say about them. Then all of a sudden, that poetry is rebranded as a work of misunderstood genius. This is because the reviewer “created” a poem where there was once only a text.

In this way, indifferent poems become critically significant simply because a respected reviewer read them in a particular way. And did so with enough style, intellect and confidence that others followed suit. This doesn’t mean the poem itself is irrelevant, but rather that its fate is collaborative. Greatness isn’t built into the lines, but built into the interpretation of them.

Some poems are lucky and find the right interpreter early, while others lie dormant for decades until cultural conditions ripen, and the right critic comes along.

We tend to think of criticism as a secondary act: reactive, not creative. But that is simply not the case. The best reviewers shape the work they comment on. They don’t just describe the poem, they also draw its meaning out of potential and into actuality.

Reviews don’t just evaluate a poem but participate in its creation. They give it a frame, a shape, that makes it recognisable as “art”.

Toward a Poetics of Complexity and Ambiguity

Empiricism’s influence on poetry has long shaped the cultural expectation that language can function transparently—that it may render perception faithfully, clarify meaning and secure subjectivity in relation to the world. But as we have seen, this aesthetic ideal, inherited from Enlightenment thought and Romantic practice alike, carries with it a set of epistemological assumptions that ultimately impoverish the poetic field. The empiricist aesthetic reduces poetry to a vehicle for the reproduction of sensory impressions or emotional states, failing to account for the instability of perception, the multiplicity of meanings and the deeply mediated nature of experience.

To move beyond empiricism is not to reject perception, language or representation outright, but to relinquish the illusion of their transparency. It is to recognise that perception is always already structured by language, culture and history—that what we “see” is never simply given, but formed within systems of mediation that resist finality. A poetics of complexity acknowledges that experience cannot be neatly captured in the image or the anecdote; it must be approached obliquely, through fragmentation, contradiction and the open-ended play of language.

Ambiguity, far from being a failure of communication, becomes central to this poetics. It signals the richness of language’s capacity to gesture in multiple directions at once, to evoke rather than denote, to suggest what cannot be pinned down. Whereas empiricism demands closure—knowledge as accumulation, poetry as artefact—a poetics of ambiguity privileges the provisional, the contingent, the enigmatic. It challenges the reader not to extract a meaning, but to dwell in interpretive indeterminacy, where meaning arises from relation, not resolution.

This shift is not merely formal. It is, fundamentally, a shift in epistemology. A poetics of complexity and ambiguity resists the totalising impulse that underlies empirical aesthetics—the idea that the world can be fully described, categorised or known. It instead aligns itself with poststructuralist thought, phenomenology and process philosophy, all of which stress the multiplicity of realities and the impossibility of exhaustive representation. The poetic subject, under this model, is not a stable perceiver but a shifting node within a network of perceptions, voices and influences.

Numerous poetic traditions and movements have enacted a turn away from empiricism, especially within the late Modernist and postmodern avant-gardes. Language poetry, Black Mountain poetics and elements of the New York School have been particularly invested in foregrounding the constructedness of meaning, rejecting lyric transparency and emphasising the politics and performativity of language. These poets often disrupt syntax, refuse linear narrative and engage in metapoetic reflection, insisting that poetry cannot mirror the world but only participate in its construction.

However, for all their formal innovation and theoretical sophistication, these traditions often exhibit a marked reticence toward emotional resonance. In their drive to escape the perceived naïveté of Romantic expressivism or mainstream sentimentality, such poetics frequently bypass the affective dimensions of experience—especially those surrounding love, loss and vulnerability. What they gain in ambiguity and multivocality, they frequently sacrifice in emotional immediacy.

This aesthetic choice, rooted in poststructuralist and anti-essentialist theory, tends to view emotion—particularly personal emotion—as ideologically suspect or intellectually regressive. As a result, the affective charge that animates the work of poets like William Blake and Emily Dickinson is often absent, leaving a poetics that, while complex and linguistically adventurous, can feel emotionally evacuated. For a truly non-empirical poetics to flourish, it must re-integrate ambiguity with affect, and complexity with emotional depth—not as confession, but as a mode of engaging the richness of human interiority beyond empiricist reduction.

However, it is important to distinguish between complexity that is merely stylistic and complexity that is epistemologically engaged. A poetics of complexity does not simply pile ambiguity upon ambiguity; it derives its force from a sustained inquiry into the limits of representation itself. It is not aesthetic difficulty for its own sake, but a mode of critique—of empiricism, of linear logic, of monolithic truth-claims.

Such a poetics also opens space for greater ethical and political depth. By refusing to flatten experience into consumable perceptions or emotional recognitions, it resists the commodification of the lyric self and the reduction of identity to legible, empirical traits. It is a space in which otherness can remain other, not merely incorporated into the dominant epistemic frame. The poem becomes not a mirror but a meeting ground—a site where selves, histories and languages encounter one another without guarantee of understanding.

In this way, the movement beyond empiricism is not a turning away from reality, but a turning more deeply into it—a recognition that reality, like language is layered, unstable and intersubjective. A poetics of complexity and ambiguity invites us to imagine perception not as reception but as co-creation, where poet and reader alike participate in shaping what is seen, what is known, and what is possible.

To write poetry under this paradigm is to take up the task not of description but of encounter. It is to confront the world not as object but as event. And it is, finally, to free poetry from the burdens of empirical fidelity and to return it to its most radical potential: to think differently, to perceive differently and to reimagine what it means to speak and be spoken.

Empiricism's Poetic Legacy

The legacy of empiricism extends far beyond the philosophical and scientific spheres, permeating deeply into the aesthetic sensibilities of the modern mind. And the empiricist aesthetic has become embedded in the modern poetic consciousness, shaping not only the content but the very form and function of poetry in contemporary contexts.

This aesthetic is rooted in the epistemological assumptions of British empiricism, which elevated experience and observation as the foundation for knowledge. Philosophers such as Locke and Hume emphasised the mind’s tabula rasa and the role of sense impressions in constructing understanding. Romantic poets, consciously or unconsciously, inherited this framework, adapting it to poetry by equating the authenticity of poetic subjectivity with the immediacy of sensory perception.

The persistence of this empiricist aesthetic in modern poetry is significant. Despite profound cultural and theoretical shifts—including the rise of postmodernism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction—the dominant poetic mode often remains tethered to the idea that poetry’s power lies in its capacity to capture and represent perceptual reality. This is evident in the enduring preference for vivid imagery, narrative clarity and emotive accessibility in much contemporary work, particularly within mainstream poetry circles and prestigious publishing houses.

Moreover, the empiricist legacy shapes the modern mind’s expectations of poetry itself. Readers are conditioned to seek coherence, clarity and direct emotional engagement, reinforcing the demand for poems that confirm rather than disrupt empirical modes of knowing. This expectation constrains poetic innovation, limiting the exploration of language’s materiality, ambiguity and its capacity to unsettle or decentre subjectivity.

However, this legacy is not without contestation. Various avant-garde, experimental and conceptual poetic practices have emerged to challenge the transparency and immediacy celebrated by the empiricist aesthetic. These practices foreground language’s instability, emphasise process over product and question the reliability of perception itself. Yet, they often remain marginalised relative to the dominant empiricist poetics that shape mainstream cultural consumption.

In addition, the empiricist poetic legacy intersects with broader socio-cultural power structures. The privileging of clear, accessible language and direct representation aligns with institutional preferences for readability and marketability, reinforcing the status quo. This alignment perpetuates a poetic culture that values empirical clarity over complexity, conformity over disruption.

Recognising this inheritance is important for any project that seeks to rethink the relationship between poetry, perception and knowledge in a post-empirical age.

Modernism’s Hidden Debt to Romanticism

Modernism is frequently celebrated as a radical rupture with the past—a movement defined by its break with tradition, its aesthetic experimentation and its disdain for the sentimentality and perceived naivety of Romanticism. Figures like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis positioned their work in conscious opposition to what they regarded as Romantic excess: its cult of the self, its mystical intuitions and its reverence for nature. Modernism, we are told, was urban, ironic, cerebral—a turning away from the Romantic imagination and toward a poetics grounded in discipline, impersonality and fragmentation.

Yet beneath this rhetoric of rupture lies a deeper continuity. Modernism, for all its self-conscious innovation, carries forward key epistemological and aesthetic commitments inherited from Romanticism. Its most radical gestures often reproduce, in altered form, the very empiricist and subjectivist assumptions it claims to reject. The Modernist revolt against Romanticism, far from a clean break, reveals a hidden debt—a continuation of the same unresolved tension between perception, language and the self that haunted Romantic poetics.

One of the clearest continuities lies in the celebration of perception as a privileged ground of poetic knowledge. Like their Romantic predecessors, many Modernist poets insist on the immediacy of the moment, the epiphany, the fragment of perception elevated to aesthetic significance. Ezra Pound’s dictum to “make it new” resonates with Wordsworth’s emphasis on “the freshness of sensation”. The Imagist focus on the “direct treatment of the thing” may discard Romantic ornament, but it retains the empiricist assumption that perception can be rendered directly and accurately through poetic language.

T.S. Eliot’s concept of the “objective correlative” also continues the Romantic pursuit of a disciplined correspondence between inner feeling and external phenomena. While Eliot sought to suppress overt subjectivity in favour of a more formal, impersonal art, his technique still relies on the capacity of the poet to find precise external correlates for inner states—a process that assumes a stable, representable relationship between mind and world. This is not a rejection of Romantic epistemology but a refinement of its empirical aesthetic within a more modernist idiom.

Moreover, Modernism inherits from Romanticism a belief in the special status of the poet as a figure of heightened perceptual awareness. Even as Eliot or Stevens reject the Romantic ego, they cultivate a poetics in which the artist’s consciousness remains central—a consciousness that filters, fragments and reorders the world. This reasserts the Romantic investment in the poet as an epistemic agent, uniquely attuned to the conditions of perception and the workings of reality.

The very fragmentation and difficulty that define Modernist forms are, paradoxically, a continuation of Romanticism’s crisis of representation. The shattered syntax and disjointed images of Eliot’s The Waste Land or Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons do not escape the Romantic problematic; they deepen it. They reveal the instability of language, the insufficiency of perception and the opacity of the self—issues already prefigured in the Romantic confrontation with the limits of empirical knowledge. Where Wordsworth dramatised the failure of sense to grasp the infinite, Eliot dramatises the failure of culture, myth and memory to restore coherence—but the underlying structure of crisis is the same.

This continuity is perhaps most evident in the persistent presence of nature, memory and emotional intensity in even the most experimental of Modernist texts. Wallace Stevens’ icy epistemological musings are never far from Romantic reverie; even Gertrude Stein, in her radical reconception of syntax, often returns to themes of presence, immediacy and consciousness—quintessentially Romantic concerns refracted through a new linguistic prism.

The hidden debt of Modernism to Romanticism, then, is not merely a matter of shared themes or stylistic echoes. It is a deeper epistemic inheritance, a shared engagement with the limits of empiricism, the problems of representation and the centrality of perception to poetic meaning. Modernism, like Romanticism, wrestles with the fundamental questions: What can be known? How is it known? And what role does language play in mediating experience?

To expose this debt is not to diminish Modernism’s innovations, but to reframe them. It invites a more critical understanding of the movement’s claims to originality and rupture, and a deeper awareness of the continuity of poetic inquiry across historical periods. Far from superseding Romanticism, Modernism extends its central concerns, often in more anxious, ironic or opaque forms. The empiricist aesthetic, the poetic self as observer and the struggle with language’s capacity to capture experience—all remain intact beneath the avant-garde veneer.

In revealing these hidden continuities, we better understand not only the persistence of Romantic structures in the modern mind, but also the limits of poetic modernity itself. The refusal to reckon fully with its Romantic inheritance leaves Modernism haunted by the very poetics it seeks to transcend—ensuring that the crisis of perception, representation and subjectivity remains unresolved, carried forward into our own contemporary poetic moment.