Life & Wisdom Quote by Adrian Mitchell

Mitchell is quietly detonating one of poetry's oldest status symbols: the idea that elevated language equals elevated truth. His insistence on speaking "the language I use to my friends" is less a stylistic preference than a credibility strategy. He's treating diction like a moral choice. If he suddenly put on "high-flown literary language", his friends "wouldn't believe" him not because they can't parse the vocabulary, but because they'd recognize the costume. The subtext is blunt: fancy language can function as social distancing.

What makes the line work is how it frames belief as the real currency of art. Mitchell isn't chasing admiration; he's chasing trust. That pushes against the conventional hierarchy where the poet performs complexity for an educated audience. Here, the audience that matters is intimate and skeptical: friends who know the speaker's actual voice and can detect when he's writing "like a poet" instead of speaking like a person. The sentence rhythms are plain, almost conversationally repetitive, reinforcing the point by example.

Context matters. Mitchell came of age alongside postwar British class stratification and the late-60s/70s surge of politically engaged, performance-friendly poetry. In that ecosystem, "high-flown" isn't neutral; it's aligned with institutions - the academy, the literary salon, the gatekeepers - that decide whose stories count. By choosing everyday speech, he isn't dumbing down. He's refusing the genre's old alibi: that obscurity is depth. The result is a poetics of solidarity, where the poem earns its authority the hard way - by sounding like it has to answer to someone.