Why David Sinclair’s Supplement Stack Keeps Changing

When the antiaging and longevity scientist David Sinclair first published his personal anti-ageing supplement stack, I thought it was unusually credible. He was a Harvard scientist telling us about a regimen that appeared to follow directly from his own scientific research: boosting NAD+, activating sirtuins, engaging AMPK pathways and combining these with lifestyle choices like fasting and exercise. At the time, I thought it was coherent, mechanistic and based on a specific theory of ageing.

Years later, however, my confidence has largely evaporated: not because the individual supplements lack antiaging benefits, but because the stack itself has become unstable.

His supplement regimen has changed repeatedly, often on a yearly basis. Supplements are added, removed, reintroduced and removed again. Each change is presented as refinement, but taken together they raise an uncomfortable question: if the science was really driving these decisions, why is there so little convergence?

Ageing science in humans moves slowly, and evidence accumulates over long timeframes. Annual reversals in personal supplement protocols are, therefore, unlikely to be based on decisive new human data. Instead, they show something else: a continual hypothesis-cycling based on animal studies, in-vitro work and emerging trends in the longevity community. While this kind of evidence is useful for research exploration, it is not strong enough to justify confident, frequently changing supplement prescriptions.

This emphasises an important distinction that often gets forgotten in longevity discussions: mechanistic plausibility is not the same as validated intervention. Many of the supplements Sinclair currently takes (NMN, resveratrol, spermidine, fisetin and berberine) have very plausible anti-ageing mechanisms. Some even have sound and encouraging early data. But plausibility alone does not explain why a protocol should keep mutating if it is truly evidence-led. In longevity supplement science, recommendations gradually narrow as weak candidates are discarded and strong ones remain. What we see here is not narrowing, but frequent rotation.

Also, most anti-ageing interventions act slowly, if they act at all, over years, not weeks or months. By frequently changing his supplement protocol, Sinclair undermines the very possibility of knowing whether any individual intervention is doing anything meaningful.

Another factor is Sinclair’s evolving public role. Early on, he spoke primarily as a scientist. Over time, he has also become a central figure in the longevity influencer community. That brings different incentives: visibility, novelty, relevance and personal branding around “what I take”. In that environment, his frequent supplement updates signal progress and authority, even when the underlying evidence has not meaningfully changed.

None of this means Sinclair is acting in bad faith. It just mean that his supplement stack should be understood for what it is: a personal supplement regime experiment that he is conducting on himself, which is continually revised, and is exploratory rather than definitive. It is not a scientifically validated anti-ageing protocol, and it should not be seen as one.

The irony is that his original stack inspired confidence precisely because it appeared stable and theory-driven. Its constant evolution has had the opposite effect.

Reflections on a Lost Cinema

Before I studied poetry, I spent two years studying film; not at a prestigious film school, but at a small college in Liverpool, called South Mersey College. Those were the best two years of my life.

At the college, we watched classic Hollywood films by directors like Howard Hawks, John Ford, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and William Wyler, alongside European avant-garde films by Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Sergei Eisenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky. We studied American Direct Cinema through the films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker and Albert and David Maysles. And also the experimental filmmaking pioneered by Len Lye and Stan Brakhage, as well as the underground cinema of Andy Warhol and Kenneth Anger. After each screening, we analysed the films’ themes, visual style, editing and historical context.

We also studied movements such as German Expressionism, Film Noir, Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, Soviet Montage, Constructivist cinema, Surrealism, British Social Realism and New Hollywood. Our reading list included Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art, Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form and The Film Sense and André Bazin’s What Is Cinema?

I was fascinated by the vibrant use of colour in 1940s and ’50s films. Bright, saturated hues made every frame look like a living painting. Music was equally as important to me, producing maybe eighty percent of a film’s emotional impact. At that time, one of my musical muses was Aaron Copland. I had only recently discovered his works, such as Fanfare for the Common Man and the score he composed for the film The Red Pony. Both pieces were life-affirming, and they became a personal soundtrack to my daydreams of the sorts of films I wanted to make. In my mind, I created film sequences, rising and falling with the flow of the music.

Had I known then how cinema would evolve, I might have been less optimistic. The digital revolution has changed everything. Traditional film stock (16 mm, 35 mm, 70 mm) has largely disappeared. Cameras have become lighter, and handheld naturalism dominates the look of films, with available light replacing carefully designed chiaroscuro lighting schemes. And long takes have largely replaced montage. Digital detail is sharper, but it lacks the depth and texture of film. The deliberate use of light, shadow and colour (the visual poetry that once defined films) has given way to bland, uniform imagery. Music, too, has shifted towards ambient textures rather than emotional scores.

Maybe this will change, and film will return as a tactile, expressive medium once digital technology matures. But for now, many contemporary films have no magic. Yet when I hear a Copland score, I can still glimpse the wonder that first drew me to film.

Old 'Carrier of the Seed' ebook review

I Just found this very old review of my 'Carrier of the Seed' ebook. I never knew it existed.

Quote from it:

"Those skeptical about the e-book format would do well to peruse it; it is proof positive that e-books are, in fact, both real and legitimate. This is a single long poem; 63 pages long, and its formal characteristics are unique: it features a single column composed of spare, terse lines, going straight down the page. This gives the poem a sleek, lean look, as is customary with Side. Reading the poem is like riding on a high-velocity train; it doesn't get sluggish, and there are no breaks in the continuity of the sustained, brisk rhythm. There is an obvious connection with some aspects of Language Poetry; the primary difference between, say, Barrett Watten's Progress and Carrier is that Carrier does actually tell a story, albeit elliptically. This is a story of love lost: memory associations, forms of consciousness which accrue to it."

https://adamfieled.blogspot.com/2007/12/jeffrey-side-carrier-of-seed.html

‘Death, Taxes and Poetry, or, Poetry is My Disability’ by Joritz-Nakagawa—guest blogger

Unable to bear it any longer, I start splintering . . .

I write this in big letters, my eyesight is fading . . .

When my father in law died I wrote a poem the second line of which was "No one will notice Milton's light has dimmed" and which ended ". . . and none of this is actually visible from the lighthouse."

This poem was published under the title The Lighthouse, in New American Writing, a print journal I am very fond of, although I read mostly online now, and also appears with no title in my 2013 poetry collection titled FLUX.

Of course I was referring to John Milton's famous sonnet ‘When I Consider How My Light is Spent’ also known as ‘On His Blindness’ and ‘Sonnet XIX,’ a poem I taught several times in an undergrad course in comparative poetry here in Japan.

After that, my mother in law died, my sister in law died (in October 2025), and my husband has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. My own parents have died, two siblings died of cancer when they are the age I am now, friends died, friends of friends and relatives of friends died, etc. et al.

I survived advanced cancer but it was a kind of devil's bargain: you can live, or you can choose palliative chemo, but your body and new life will be (almost?) unrecognizable in many important ways. But not in this way: poetry is still my disability.

I have written somewhat extensively about death as well as my multiple chronic illnesses and other disabilities and those of others.

When at one of my lowest points, before my third surgery for cancer, I was so frightened of death and further disability that I read Emily Dickinson's poems aloud to myself every night from my bed. Any poem of hers that mentioned psychic pain would do. And there is a great many of such poems by Dickinson, so there was much to choose from! I didn't even have to repeat myself, as I often do!

I am not saying however that disability is bad or necessarily frightening. I don't think that at all, and I was already disabled anyhow before I got cancer. I just became much more so—more disabled I mean. I was afraid of suffering, which is not the same thing as disability, or death, and the unknown, and perhaps a feeling of my own powerlessness in this situation. Please let's not confuse these!

I was net surfing recently and found somebody much younger than myself referring to a group of young persons who are "dark" (their word, not mine!) and inevitably drawn to Plath! I was very surprised to hear this remark! First, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that young people know who Plath is! Although always interested in Plath due to her thematic range, theatricality, power, mastery of verse and stylistic achievements, I didn't really feel the depth of that kind of darkness that appears in some of her late poems until later in life when due to extensive bereavement I felt I was living in it. Or as a Christian friend said to me recently, maybe this life on earth is hell, and heaven is what we get when we die?

But we (= I) also know, if only from opera, that love makes a heaven out of life if only temporarily; love is fragile and can turn to hate or disinterest or disappointment, etc. with relative ease. Can it bounce back with relative ease?

The happiest elegy (actually a so-called "self-elegy" which is why it is more cheerful!) I know is Christina Rossetti's ‘Remember,’ another poem I have taught to undergrads; the saddest is ‘Ending with a Line From Lear’ by Marvin Bell, which I have not. At times of intense suffering (e.g. physical pain, or, bereavement or depression) I have often repeated to myself his line: "I will never be better again" oftentimes followed by the final line, the repetition of the word "never." I was wrong about that, but it helped me to say it, anyway. There's also song lyrics by the band Everclear which begin "I hate waking up, it means I have to die again tonight…" another set of words I have repeated in my head upon waking up during my worst moments in life. As well as the beginning and ending of William Carlos Williams' poem ‘The Widow's Lament in Springtime;’ interestingly, the lyrics to Everclear's ‘Fire Maple Song’ contains a line similar to one in Williams' poem. These poems and songs soothe me somehow during difficult times, although they do much more than that.

Yet life changes, we change, things change.

But poetry is still my disability.

As a person with fibromyalgia, one of the Plath lines I most identify with, from her incredible poem ‘Tulips’ published when I was two years old, is: "The tulips are too red in the first place they hurt me."

I was raised by Plath. No, I don't mean I was raised on Plath or knew her personally. I mean Plath's generation was my mother's generation and they both raised me, if not revived me. A fiction writer friend who also likes poetry once said: "All women can relate to Plath." She meant all women of our generation. Because we were raised by Plath.

When I say "blue bladder" I don't mean the color blue. I mean my bladder is sad. Because it was removed from my body seven years ago.

When I say "There are baroque places inside me" I am quoting someone else.

Poetry is my disability.

NOTES:

“There are baroque places inside me” comes from the poem ‘The Believable Weather of His Baroque Face on a Wall’ by Raymond Farr in the journal Upstairs at Duroc, ed. Barbara Beck, issue 17, 2020, Paris.

A monograph by the author about Plath and other female poets under the title Dying Swans is available online via Argotist Ebooks.

Bob Dylan’s “Jimmie Rodgers” Voice on ‘Nashville Skyline’

Last year I noticed for the first time that Bob Dylan’s singing voice on Nashville Skyline was a direct homage to Jimmie Rodgers. I’d been a Dylan fan for years without realising this; and wouldn’t have, had I not happened to hear a clip of Rodgers singing. I was astounded by the similarity.

When Nashville Skyline came out in 1969, Dylan’s voice was widely remarked upon as being very different from his usual one. The nasal, reedy tone had been replaced by a warmer and smoother sound. This was seen as being more “country music–oriented”, though in what specific sense was never really explained. It was simply taken as a given.

As far as I know, no one has ever identified this “specific sense”, which I now believe to be Dylan’s adoption of Jimmie Rodgers’ vocal style.

Jimmie Rodgers is often called “the father of country music” for his relaxed, storytelling delivery, which helped define the genre’s emotional vocabulary. He was also distinct in his use of yodelling, which, as far as I know, was never used in country music before him.

Dylan, with his near-encyclopaedic knowledge of folk and country songs, would have known Rodgers’ songs inside out. He grew up with Rodgers’ music, and in interviews mentioned owning the album Hank Snow Sings Jimmie Rodgers as a teenager. And in The Bootleg Series Vol. 15: Travelin' Thru, 1967–1969 sessions, he sang Jimmie Rodgers medleys with Johnny Cash.

It seems very likely, then, that for Nashville Skyline he chose to base its vocal “sonic architecture” on Rodgers’ voice. Every song on the album can be heard as an homage to Rodgers’ singing.

Though critics immediately noticed Dylan’s changed voice, none remarked on how much it sounded like Rodgers’. That oversight is glaring, given the unmistakable resemblance.

And while Dylan never said outright, 'I sang like Jimmie Rodgers on Nashville Skyline' the parallels are obvious.

This is not to suggest that he was "channelling" Rodgers or mimicking him. It was more a continuation of a lineage. Rodgers’ voice represented the ordinary person singing about their troubles and pleasures in a simple, unembellished way. However, where Rodgers had turned American “work songs” and blues into country, Dylan turned country into something like an “art song”—but without pretension.

Rachel Lisi—Still Remembered

A dear friend of mine died in 2010, aged only 40. Her name was Rachel Lisi. She was an unknown poet who deserved to be known. She was also a photographer and graphic artist, and did a few cover images for Argotist Ebooks.

I just wanted to mention her now, after all these years, to keep her memory alive.

Here is a YouTube video her family put together after she died.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xbL4R0CS34

Kent Johnson: In Praise of Mischief and Literary Disruption

It’s been several years now since Kent Johnson passed. I had corresponded with him for roughly a decade, from around 2008 until a few months before his death, and I once interviewed him for The Argotist Online. At one point, he approached me about publishing an ebook of his collected writings. I was eager to do so but the project ultimately fell through: the sheer volume of material he offered, and the extensive editing it required, felt beyond my capacity. Still, I was genuinely flattered that he had asked me—and that he had such faith in ebooks as a medium.

Kent was something of a mythical figure in the circles of contemporary poetry. He was someone no one could quite categorise: was he a critic, a satirist, an archivist or a literary provocateur? When he was a child in Montevideo, he played ping-pong with the sons of ambassadors and even had Duke Ellington pat him on the head, and saying, ‘And what is your name, handsome young man?’—which he mentioned decades later with fondness. And in his early twenties, he was a literacy teacher in Nicaragua, living with revolutionaries and translating his first poetry collection in collaboration with Ernesto Cardenal, a priest and poet.

In the correspondence I had with him, I saw the breadth of his vision. He engaged deeply with avant-garde practice, the politics of poetry and the sociology of literary communities. He was always curious about the literary world; and no claim, scandal and poetic controversy was too insignificant for his attention. He questioned cliques, examined complicity and exposed absurdities with a sharp wit, but never with cruelty.

Looking back, I think what fascinated him most about poetry was its potential as a kind of “performance art”. Not in the sense of being performed as in “performance poetry”, but as an “idea” that could be used for performative interventions: mischief, satire or creative disruption. He cared less for poetry as a personal or aesthetic expression than for its capacity to function as a “disruptive element”—a kind of conceptual defamiliarisation that could unsettle, provoke or even create chaos.

Even in his youth, chaos was never too far away. A bowling alley in Carrasco, Uruguay, was bombed by Tupamaros (a Marxist–Leninist urban guerrilla group that operated in Uruguay during the 1960s and 1970s) just a few hours after he'd been there with the two sons of two CIA counterinsurgency specialists.

In the end, his work demonstrates that poetry is not only about the page, but is a performative act, a playground for imaginative intervention. He treated the literary world as a stage, and poetry as the stage directions.

When my friend the poet and photographer, Rachel Lisi, died unexpectedly at the age of only 40 in 2010, Kent commiserated with me, saying that though as a poet she was little-recognised, she would always be remembered. May the same be true of him.

Poetry and Song Are the Same Artform

The debate over whether poems and songs are separate art forms or simply variations of the same aesthetic expression has a long history. At first sight, the difference seems obvious: poems are primarily meant to be read, while songs are experienced as sound, with music and vocals creating a listening experience. This distinction is often taken as self-evident, determining how audiences approach and categorise these forms. Yet this superficial difference overlooks deeper questions about how each affects us emotionally and cognitively, and about the complex ways in which language, sound and rhythm interact to determine artistic experience.

One significant difference is in how we experience rhythm. Poems rely on rhythm, rhyme and line breaks built into the written text, engaging the reader’s “inner ear” as they mentally hear the flow while reading. This internal auditory experience is an imaginative process, determined by linguistic background, prior knowledge and personal interpretation. Songs, on the other hand, deliver rhythm externally through melody, instrumentation and vocal performance, creating a direct auditory impact. The physical presence of sound waves and the nuances of timbre, pitch and volume give songs a sensorial immediacy that written poetry lacks. The performative element (the singer’s voice, the arrangement, even the listening setting) adds layers of meaning and emotion beyond the text itself.

Critics sometimes suggest that poems and songs invoke fundamentally different responses, yet much of this originates from cultural expectation and setting. In many traditions, songs belong to communal gatherings, rituals and celebrations, engaging listeners through shared sound and movement, while poetry is more often associated with solitary reflection or intellectual engagement. Reading a poem draws on the “inner ear”, determining rhythm and tone through imagination, whereas hearing a song delivers these qualities directly through melody, repetition and performance. In both cases, response is determined not only by the work itself but by the way it is encountered: in private or in company, in silence or in sound, in memory or in the moment. The boundary between them is fluid: many songs contain poetic language, and many poems have been set to music, underscoring the interplay between the two forms.

Despite this, the difference between a poem read on the page and a song heard aloud is less absolute than it seems. Poetry, when read, activates the imagination and inner hearing, drawing us in through patterns of sound and rhythm in the mind’s ear. These sonic qualities can evoke emotion and meaning much like music does, even in silence. The pauses between lines, the visual layout of stanzas and the typography of the text all shape its rhythm and pacing, producing effects that songs sometimes echo but cannot fully replicate. This internalisation of sound allows poetry to transcend the limitations of the printed page, creating a deeply personal and intimate experience that varies widely between individuals and contexts.

Whilst formal distinctions remain (poems are lines on a page, songs combine lyrics with melody and instrumentation), both share a common aesthetic foundation of sound, rhythm, voice and emotional resonance. The difference between them lies more in context and expectation than in essence.

Neuroscience corroborates this connection, demonstrating that reading poetry and listening to music engage overlapping brain networks, particularly in processing rhythm, sound patterns and emotion. Brain imaging shows that both activities stimulate regions linked to auditory perception, emotional regulation and pattern recognition; whether the rhythm is imagined through the reader’s “inner ear” or carried to us on waves of melody and instrumentation. At the same time, each form also draws on specialised circuitry: poetry on the page largely utilises language-processing areas, while song largely utilises pitch and melody-related regions. This blend of shared and distinct activation suggests that the mind responds to both with a common aesthetic framework, yet determines that response to match the sensory pathway (silent reading or audible performance) through which the art is experienced.

Ultimately, the difference between poems as read experiences and songs as heard experiences shows how context, perception and mental engagement determine our experience of artistic expression. Recognising their shared aesthetic roots and the fluidity between reading and listening gives us a broader appreciation of how rhythm, voice and sound create meaning: whether imagined in the mind or heard through the ears. The borders between literary and musical arts, therefore, are permeable, shifting with culture, history and individual perception.

'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.

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

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.

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.

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 Mystery of James Bond’s Rolex

I came across an interesting forum discussion on a James Bond forum called “Absolutely James Bond” that discussed which watch Bond wore in the Ian Fleming novels:

https://www.ajb007.co.uk/discussion/35980/bond-s-watch-in-the-thunderball-novel

Apparently, in the world of James Bond fandom, the watch he is said to wear is a Rolex Explorer 1016, and the consensus has been for many years that this is the watch that Fleming intended for him to wear. However, the forum discussion posited that this was not the watch he wore.

The discussion was initiated by a forum member called ”Osris”, who brought up an interesting point about the Rolex Explorer 1016, and argued that while the Explorer 1016 is commonly associated with Bond, there is a gap in the timeline when the novels are examined. He said:

’In the Thunderball novel, Bond is mentioned as wearing a water resistant watch on his dive to examine the underside of The Disco Volante. As the novel was published in 1961, and completed probably up to a year before that, this would make the watch unlikely to be the Explorer 1016, as that only came into production in 1963.’

He went on to make a persuasive case that if Bond had been wearing an earlier model of the Explorer, the water resistance would only have been rated to 50 metres—far less a depth rating than Bond would need for his diving activities. Osris said that this brought into question the practicality of the Explorer for a spy who is frequently involved in dangerous underwater activities, leading him to suggest that it was more likely that Bond wore a Rolex Submariner.

As the discussion progressed, Osris and other forum members pointed out that the Rolex Submariner 6538 (a model introduced in 1956) fits the description much more closely. This watch had a 200-metre water resistance rating, making it far more suitable for a spy involved in underwater activities. 

For Osris, the 6538 was also seen as a more fitting choice for someone with Bond’s background in the navy. The design of the Submariner being a more practical and appropriate watch for Bond, who was constantly involved in situations that required diving.

Another interesting point raised in the discussion was about a remark made by Felix Leiter in Thunderball, where he describes Bond’s watch as “old”. Osris said that since the Explorer 1016 came out in 1959, it would have been difficult for Leiter to describe it as “old” by the time Thunderball was written in 1961. This, again, indicates a different model being worn by Bond that was probably older and in line with Osris’s theory that it was the Submariner 6538.

As the discussion progressed, the Rolex 6200 came up. This came out in the mid-1950s, and had a 200-metre water resistance rating. This model was seen as relevant because it combines characteristics of both the Explorer and the Submariner: it has the Explorer's dial design and the Submariner's rotating bezel. However, it also had the “Oyster Perpetual” label rather than "Submariner" label on its dial, and so had no specific branding indicating it as a Submariner.

The hybrid nature of the 6200 led some forum members to wonder whether this could have been the model Fleming had in mind when describing Bond’s watch, although like with the Explorer and Submariner, the evidence is only speculative.

Another element brought up in the thread was Ian Fleming’s own vagueness when describing Bond’s watch. As a forum member called ”Donald Grant” pointed out in the discussion, Fleming was known for equipping Bond with products he (Fleming) personally liked, but when it came to the watch, he left the details purposefully ambiguous. In fact, Bond’s watch was only described as a “Rolex Oyster Perpetual”, and no further details were provided, which has left Bond fans to fill in the gaps over the years.

Fleming’s personal connection to the Explorer 1016 is well known, but as the discussion progressed, it was posited that his lack of precision could have been intentional, leaving room for the reader’s imagination. Donald Grant argued that Fleming’s main goal was to simply associate Bond with a Rolex, rather than a specific model, which is why the exact model of the watch remains open to debate.

The discussion has been an eye-opener for me. A few years ago, I read an article by Dell Deaton, a well-known writer in the world of James Bond horology, who is recognised for his research into the Rolex Explorer 1016 and its connection to James Bond. In the article, Deaton argued that Bond's watch in the novels was a Rolex Explorer 1016. However, none of the observations made in the forum discussion were mentioned in the article, which now leads me to believe that Deaton's research may not have been as thorough as it could have been.

What is clear from the discussion is that the question of which Rolex Bond wore in the novels is far from settled. As Osris and other forum members pointed out, we may never know for sure which Rolex Bond did wear.

See also:

'Dell Deaton and the Rolex Explorer 1016 in the Bond Novels'

https://jeffrey-side.blogspot.com/2025/03/dell-deaton-and-rolex-explorer-1016-in.html

What’s in a Name?: The Art & Language Group and Conceptual Poetry

(Adapted from an article I wrote for The Argotist Online in 2013)

In his 2013 article, ‘Charmless and Interesting: What Conceptual Poetry Lacks and What It’s Got’ Robert Archambeau asks: ‘In what sense is pure conceptualism poetry, beyond the institutional sense of being distributed and considered through the channels by which poetry is distributed and considered?’ The answer to this question would clarify the relationship between conceptual poetry, conceptual art and the generally accepted definition of poetry as being specifically a literary art whereby language is utilised aesthetically and evocatively.

That some of the concerns and practices of conceptual poetry are not new in the world of conceptual art needs no extensive repetition here. However, it is interesting to note that in relation to conceptual poetry’s use of texts and lexical elements to comprise its works, a fairly recent historical precedent already exists. This can be seen in the theories, practices and works of 1960s conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner, Edward Ruscha and Robert Barry; and also in the theories, practices and works of the conceptual art group known as Art & Language, which was formed by Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, Harold Hurrell and David Bainbridge in 1968. Others affiliated with this group, included Ian Burn, Michael Corris, Preston Heller, Graham Howard, Joseph Kosuth, Andrew Menard, Terry Smith, Philip Pilkington and David Rushton. These artists were among the first to produce art from textual and lexical sources.

The notable similarity between the theories of this group and those of conceptual poetry’s is that the group developed, extended and championed the conceptual theories that were initiated by artists such as Marcel Duchamp. The group also held the view that the practice of art should be systematically theoretical and entirely separated from concerns relating to craft or aesthetics. These and other ideas appeared in the group’s journal, Art-Language, the first issue of which appeared in 1969.

A direct parallel with the works of these artists and those produced by conceptual poets is not my intention here. There will be differences in scale (both physical and theoretical) and presentation between them; suffice to say, that the common element they share is that of a conceptual approach to their works, and as such, this leads us back to Archambeau’s question (‘In what sense is pure conceptualism poetry, beyond the institutional sense of being distributed and considered through the channels by which poetry is distributed and considered?’), and also one that I would like to ask. If it is at all possible to agree that both the Art & Language group and conceptual poetry share similar theoretical stances and working practices, then in what sense is the work produced by conceptual poetry more suited to be called poetry than that of the Art & Language group?

In one of the two Facebook discussions I took part in a few years ago about Archambeau’s question, it was mentioned by someone that the term “poetry” was merely an honorific one, conferred by the academy on what it deemed was poetry: the logical extension of this being that if the academy should deem, for instance, a text-book to be poetry then it would have to be accepted that a text-book was, indeed, poetry. In response to this, someone else mentioned that the approach of the literary theorist Roman Jakobson was more reasonable, in that Jakobson saw poetry as marked by specific functions in language rather than by an arbitrary redesignation by the academy of general texts. I agreed with the latter.

In light of this, it seems to me that given that there is no significant difference between the work of the Art & Language group and that of conceptual poetry, for the work of the latter to be designated as poetry whilst that of the former is not, seems a peculiarly inconsistent and whimsical act on the part of the academy. It seems to me, that neither the Art & Language group nor conceptual poetry can accurately be described as producing works of poetry, given that they are both operating from within a conceptual art aesthetic and theoretical stance.