Born in Birkenhead in 1932, Adrian Henri is not technically a Liverpudlian, but he was certainly, as Edward Lucie-Smith described him, the “theoretician” of the Liverpool Poets group and the movement known as Merseybeat (Lucie-Smith 1970, 348). This performance-based movement was active in Liverpool in the 1960s, aiming to engage and entertain a local live audience with an all-encompassing “total art” experience, using dynamic staging, music, and visual art alongside the words of the poems themselves. Trained as a painter, Henri eschewed traditional boundaries between the arts, and his work in this time and in the decades following took multiple forms: literature (poetry for both adults and children, plays, collaborative work); v…
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Citation: Taylor, Helen. "Adrian Henri". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 09 December 2013 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2083, accessed 26 November 2024.]
