Adrian Henri's major achievements are as a poet and a painter, and his sheer versatility in the arts helped to transform the popular impression of British poetry in the 1960s. His cultural eclecticism and his organising ability and enthusiasm were key elements in making the 1960s Liverpool poetry explosion happen the way it did.

The huge range of his influences and his deliberate changes of style have resulted in some unevenness in his own work, and he has frequently been damned with faint praise. Yet the best of his poetry, from the 1960s through to his most recent publications, presents highly individual fusions of public and private worlds.

Adrian Henri's poetry, more so than that of Roger McGough or Brian Patten, is particularly redolent of Liverpool: local references and place-names abound, and his poetry creates a Liverpool that is both ordinary and magical, everyday and legendary. Heavily inspired by New York Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Henri brings home William Blake's vision of Albion: an England of heroic optimism as well as tedium and hypocrisy, and where the mythical exists within the commonplace, just waiting to be seen.

However, Henri in his early poems is also emphatically a pop poet. The opening (and closing) lines of ‘Mrs Albion You've Got A Lovely Daughter’ are full of youth, excitement, sexuality and Liverpool:

Adrian Henri's poems are mostly love poems, autobiographical snippets and collages full of bright and dark sensual detail; others are wry little observations and wordplays, often a bit funny, often poignant. Others, with various intentions, experiment with forms, including a last will and testament, advertisements, short stories and stage directions; and some are flights of fantasy, bringing great buffetings of apocalyptic imagery or setting characters from fiction and myth in the everyday world.