Life & Wisdom Quote by Adrian Mitchell

A poet admitting "I don't like writing essays or theory" is less a shrug than a small act of defiance. Adrian Mitchell built a reputation on poems that wanted to be heard in public, not filed in seminars: work that traveled through protests, classrooms, and ordinary conversations. The line draws a boundary between lived language and the institutional habits that try to pin it down. It’s not anti-intellectual so much as anti-clerical in the modern sense: distrustful of the priesthood that turns art into doctrine.

The intent reads as protective. Essays and theory are where writers are expected to justify themselves, to translate impulse into credentialed explanation. Mitchell’s refusal implies that poetry’s authority comes from contact - with feeling, with politics, with the body’s own music - rather than from a footnoted rationale. There’s also a canny awareness of how theory can launder responsibility. If everything is discourse, nothing has to hurt; if everything is interpretation, nothing has to act. Mitchell, a famously engaged poet, tips his hand toward action and immediacy.

Subtext: I’d rather make the thing than talk about the thing. I’d rather risk sentiment, clarity, even naivete than trade them for the safer prestige of abstraction. In the mid-to-late 20th century, when academic criticism and postwar theory were rising as cultural gatekeepers, that preference becomes a position. It’s a reminder that poetry, at its most serious, doesn’t always want to be explained; it wants to be used.