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.

The Empirical Illusion of Romantic Subjectivity

Romanticism is often celebrated as the epoch that privileged subjectivity, imagination and emotion against the cold rationalism of the Enlightenment and the rising scientific worldview. Its poets are credited with inaugurating a new poetic subjectivity that privileges interiority, spontaneity and a deep attunement to the self’s feelings and intuitions. However, such subjectivity is, paradoxically, deeply entangled with and even reinforces the modern scientific gaze through its empiricist foundations. The so-called Romantic subject is not a radical break from empiricism but a complex reenactment of empirical assumptions about perception and knowledge, creating what can be described as an empirical illusion of subjectivity.

At the core of this illusion is the Romantic poet’s claim to authentic, direct experience grounded in sensory perception. The Romantic subject perceives the natural world with immediacy and intensity, privileging sense data as the foundation for poetic truth. This mode of perception situates the subject as an observer, a perceiver whose consciousness functions much like a scientific instrument—receiving, registering and transmitting sensory information. The poetic self is cast as an empirical subject who objectively witnesses phenomena and translates them into language, thus mirroring the empirical method central to modern science.

Yet this mirroring is deceptive. Romantic subjectivity masks the active, interpretive processes inherent in perception and linguistic representation. By presenting perception as immediate and transparent, Romantic poetry naturalises the epistemic stance of detached observation, obscuring the mediation performed by the mind and language. The subject’s “feelings” and “intuitions” are themselves shaped by cultural, linguistic and conceptual frameworks, yet these frameworks are rendered invisible by the rhetoric of authentic experience.

The Romantic poetic subject becomes complicit in the very project it seems to resist, reaffirming the authority of observation, objectivity and the categorisation of experience. In doing so, Romantic poetry contributes to the modern epistemological regime that privileges empirical evidence and sensory data as the primary path to knowledge.

Moreover, this alignment is evident in the ways Romantic poets often appropriate scientific imagery and discourse, invoking optics, optics metaphors and natural philosophy to legitimise their poetic claims. The natural world is depicted as a arena to be observed, measured and known through the senses, echoing the practices of empirical science. The Romantic poet’s gaze is thus an extension of the scientific gaze, refracted through the lens of personal sensibility but retaining its foundational assumptions.

This empirical illusion shapes Romantic poetic form and style. The preference for clear imagery, precise description and vivid sensory detail reflects the epistemic commitments to empirical observation. The very aesthetic of transparency—where language aims to be a clear window onto the world—derives from this empiricist subjectivity. Such poetics values representation over disruption, coherence over ambiguity, reinforcing the stability of the empirical worldview.

The consequences of this empirical illusion extend beyond Romanticism, seeping into the modern and contemporary poetic tradition. The scientific gaze, mediated through the empiricist subject, continues to dominate poetic perception and expression. Even critiques of Romanticism often remain trapped within its empirical framework, unwittingly perpetuating the illusion that poetry’s relationship to reality is one of transparent mediation.

Recognising this allows for a more critical engagement with Romantic poetics and sets the stage for exploring alternative modes of perception and poetic practice that disrupt the empirical illusion.

Coleridge and the Failure of Empirical Compromise

If William Wordsworth constructed a poetics of perception, then Samuel Taylor Coleridge struggled—heroically, inconsistently and ultimately inconclusively—to dismantle it. His poetic philosophy is a record of resistance: to the tyranny of the senses, to the passivity of observation, to the narrowing of language into the role of mirror. Where Wordsworth entrenched empiricism, Coleridge exposed its contradictions. Yet Coleridge’s tragedy, and perhaps his failure, is that his critique never fully displaced the epistemological foundations he sought to challenge. He could not, or would not, break with the empirical frame altogether.

Coleridge is often invoked as the counterpoint to Wordsworth’s naturalism: the mystic to the realist, the thinker to the feeler. But this binary oversimplifies. Coleridge was not merely a dreamer in contrast to Wordsworth’s walker. He was, in many respects, more analytically rigorous, more philosophically engaged and more alert to the perils of unexamined assumptions. Where Wordsworth accepted sensory perception as the ground of poetic truth, Coleridge questioned what it meant to perceive at all. He suspected—rightly—that empiricism smuggled in a hidden metaphysics of passivity, and that to base poetry on sensation was to surrender agency at the outset.

And yet, despite this insight, Coleridge never fully escaped the gravitational pull of empiricism. His early writings are steeped in associationist psychology. He read Hartley with enthusiasm. His attempts to reconcile sensation and imagination are burdened by the very philosophical categories he sought to transcend. In Biographia Literaria, he attempts a distinction between fancy and imagination, elevating the latter as a synthetic, unifying power capable of transforming perception into insight. But even this formulation grants too much to perception itself. It begins with the given world and merely reshapes it. Language remains reactive rather than creative.

His greatest poems, however, betray a different impulse. In The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, ‘Kubla Khan’ and Christabel, Coleridge does not describe the world—he disorients it. These poems do not depict reality; they warp it. Time becomes unstable, space collapses, language becomes incantatory rather than expository. There is no stable subject observing a stable world. Instead, we find spectral presences, hallucinations, reversals of causality. This is not the language of sense-data—it is the language of vision, of the uncanny, of what cannot be seen but must be imagined.

And yet, Coleridge’s critical writings seek to rationalise this irrationality. He defends imagination but returns again and again to empirical language: “facts”, “experience”, “truth”. It is as though he feared the very implications of his own poetic practice. His commitment to German Idealism was never fully integrated into his poetics; it hovered above them like an aspiration never realised.

This internal contradiction has had consequences. Coleridge’s legacy has too often been used to reinforce, rather than undermine, the empirical model of poetic thought. His formulations about imagination are quoted in support of a poetics that still treats perception as primary. Even his boldest theoretical interventions are neutralised by their anchoring in epistemological “balance”—a word he uses frequently, and fatally. The imagination becomes not a radical force but a mediating one. It is a supplement to perception, not a replacement for it.

There is, then, a kind of bad faith in Coleridge’s philosophical project. He gestures toward the liberatory potential of the imagination, but retreats into empiricism when the stakes become too high. His inability—or unwillingness—to abandon the language of perception leaves him caught in a poetics of compromise. It is a failure not of intellect, but of resolve.

Nevertheless, Coleridge remains essential—not because he resolved the crisis of empiricism, but because he revealed it. In recognising that perception alone cannot ground poetry, that language is not a neutral medium but a force of distortion and creation, he opened a space that later poets would either occupy or evade. His failure is instructive, because it makes clear what is required: not a synthesis of observation and imagination, but a break. Not a reconciliation with empiricism, but a severance from its dominion over the poetic act.

The 1980s: The Last Great Cultural Decade

I was in my twenties during the 1980s and didn't realise just how extraordinary a decade it was. Looking back now, I feel that decade was the last time culture felt unified, daring and truly alive. People still go on about the 1960s, and rightly so. But if any decade since came close to matching its cultural impact, it was the 1980s. For me, no other decade has come close.

The decade saw the advent of MTV, which gave visual representation to pop songs, turning them into short films, often to a high artistic standard, that everyone watched. It seemed as if each new hit by artists like Madonna or Michael Jackson was a newsworthy event, mentioned on TV and radio news.

There was a shared experience back then. Songs were on the radio, in music videos and in films, like “Take My Breath Away” from Top Gun and “What a Feeling” from Flashdance. These weren’t just hits, they were events. Music, film and fashion moved together, like one element. The concept of “niche markets” had yet to be invented or become a blight on cultural experience.

The films of the 1980s had a kind of magic. They entertained without cynicism. Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Ghostbusters, were optimistic, stylish and heart-warming. There was still wonder in films then. Few were franchises, and few depended on comic book heroes, like 98% of films now.

The “flashy” clothes people wore (mostly in primary colours) and the "loud" hairstyles might look ridiculous now, but there was confidence and rebellion in them. You could tell someone’s “group” by their look: punks, mods, metalheads, new romantics, goths, rappers. Fashion wasn’t minimalist. It was expressive. People dressed like they meant it. Irony had no place in fashion back then.

The decades that followed resulted in a splintered culture. Then the internet arrived and took away the shared experience we all had. Everyone got their own niche, their own algorithm, their own curated feed.

Today, a song goes viral for 15 seconds. A film goes to streaming shortly after its release and disappears within a week. Music, fashion and film don’t “talk to each other” the way they used to.

In the 1980s, it all felt connected. A song could define a summer. An item of fashion could start a craze. A film could make you want to carry on living. There was a collective rhythm and cultural heartbeat you could feel.

I didn’t know I was living in the last great cultural decade. None of us did at the time. But when I look back now, from the blandness of today’s culture, I see a decade that was vibrant, confident and full of creative cohesion. I miss it greatly. Not just for what it was, but for the kind of culture it made possible. The kind we will probably never see again, as long as the internet exists.