Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell FRSL (24 October 1932 – 20 December 2008)[1] was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him "the British Mayakovsky".[2]
Adrian Mitchell
24 October 1932
London, England
20 December 2008 (aged 76)
London, England
Poet, novelist, playwright, cultural activist
English
"To Whom It May Concern"
Celia Hewitt
Mitchell sought in his work to counteract the implications of his own assertion, that "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people."[3]
In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005, his poem "Human Beings" was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space.[4] In 2002, he was nominated, semi-seriously, as Britain's "Shadow Poet Laureate".[5] Mitchell was for some years poetry editor of the New Statesman, and was the first to publish an interview with the Beatles.[6] His work for the Royal Shakespeare Company included Peter Brook's US and the English version of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade.[1]
Ever inspired by the example of his own favourite poet and precursor William Blake, about whom he wrote the acclaimed Tyger for the National Theatre, Mitchell's often angry output swirled from anarchistic anti-war satire, through love poetry to, increasingly, stories and poems for children. He also wrote librettos. The Poetry Archive identified his creative yield as hugely prolific.[7]
The Times said that Mitchell's had been a "forthright voice often laced with tenderness". His poems on such topics as nuclear war, Vietnam, prisons and racism had become "part of the folklore of the Left. His work was often read and sung at demonstrations and rallies".[8]
Biography[edit]
Early life and career[edit]
Adrian Mitchell was born near Hampstead Heath, north London. His mother, Kathleen Fabian, was a Fröbel-trained nursery school teacher and his father, Jock Mitchell, a research chemist from Cupar in Fife. Adrian was educated at the Junior School of Monkton Combe School in Bath. He then went to Greenways School, at Ashton Gifford House in Wiltshire, run at the time by a friend of his mother. This, said Mitchell, was "a school in Heaven, where my first play, The Animals' Brains Trust, was staged when I was nine to my great satisfaction."[9]
His schooling was completed as a boarder at Dauntsey's School, where he collaborated in plays with friend Gordon Snell.[10] Mitchell did his National Service in the RAF. He commented that this "confirmed (his) natural pacificism".[9] He went on to study English at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was taught by J. R. R. Tolkien's son. Mitchell became chairman of the university's poetry society and the literary editor of Isis magazine.[11] On graduating, he got a job as a reporter on the Oxford Mail and, later, at the Evening Standard in London.[3] He later wrote of this period:
