Frankie Gardner (@frankiegardner.bsky.social)

Britain’s poetic obsession with the lawnmower Research by a postgraduate student at St Catharine's has revealed how British poets over the last 50 years such as Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion have driven a ‘lawnmower poetry microgenre’, using the machine to explore childhood, masculinity, violence, addiction, mortality and much more. Francesca Gardner, an English PhD student, argues in her article published by Critical Quarterly that this tradition goes back to the 17th-century poet Andrew Marvell who used mowing – with a scythe – to comment on the violence of the English Civil War. https://www.caths.cam.ac.uk/lawnmower