Here is the late Adrian Mitchell, reading his poem “To Whom It May Concern”:

The performance is something; the tone of the performance especially. It isn’t totally deducible from what’s on the page, which could be read as sing-song sarcastic or crisply Audenesque. Mitchell is so terribly earnest here, so terribly in earnest, that the “ha ha bonk” elements of the poem appear as symptoms of an impairment (“[e]ver since the accident I’ve walked this way”), marks of a passionate disbelief in the reality of what one is seeing.

Michael Rosen, writing a tribute to Mitchell in the Socialist Worker, identifies him as a visionary humanist in the tradition of Blake:

Adrian was a socialist and a pacifist who believed, like William Blake, that everything human was “holy”. That’s to say he celebrated a love of life with the same fervour that he attacked those who crushed life.

I can’t help raising the quibble: those who “crush life” are themselves human, and are expressing something of their humanity (or their human animality) in so doing. Blake’s line was “everything that lives is holy, life delights in life”, which leads in turn to “energy is eternal delight”: life’s delight in itself is the immanent passage of an inextinguishable energy which sanctifies all that it fills. The Blakean righteous loathing of everything that restricts, obstructs or diminishes this life-energy is indeed a kind of “fervour”, of which Mitchell was one of the inheritors in our time (Paul Foot, in his adoration of Shelley, would be another). But it makes for a strange kind of Manicheanism in politics, in which the human perpetually faces off against the inhuman, the straight against the twisted, the conscientious against the depraved:

You put your bombers in, you put your conscience out,

You take the human being and you twist it all about.

You “put your conscience out” the way you might put your back out: cricking it, warping it, twisting it all about. The “accident” with which the poem begins (“I was run over by the truth one day”) is a second putting-out, which sets the speaker’s twisted conscience straight. As a result, the madness and horror of Vietnam reappear - as flames, screaming, the smell of burning - in the midst of an everyday life from which they had been expunged. But they do so as apparations, within a visionary mode of consciousness, rather than in their literal reality. Visionary intuition apprehends reality through a double torsion, re-falsifying the false (“lies about Vietnam”). In a similar fashion, Shelley’s “The Masque of Anarchy” conjures the truth of what Eldon and Castlereagh are and have done through a parade of fantastic personifications, “the visions of poesy” casting them as ghouls and night-horrors.

How does this work out politically? It makes murder, fraud and injustice vividly apparent; it drives away cynical acceptance of the unacceptable with a passion that is both personally energising and morally commanding. That is one way of talking about some of the good that Adrian Mitchell, as a poet, did in the world. My only question is: does it show murder, fraud and injustice for what they really are? One might argue that that isn’t the visionary poet’s job (and that it depends what you mean by “really”); and that’s fair enough. But “the holy” is not a political category*, and cannot carry a political value: politics is profane, which is to say that it is (amongst other things) human. When it comes to it, I don’t believe that everything human is holy; bless Adrian Mitchell for thinking so, but I can’t.

* For materialist politics, anyway. Mind you, that’s a bit circular: you could say that materialist politics is that politics for which the holy is not a political category.