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.