Over the last half-century, British poets including Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion have driven a ‘lawnmower poetry microgenre’, using the machine to explore childhood, masculinity, violence, addiction, mortality and much more, new research shows. The study, published in Critical Quarterly , argues that the tradition goes back to the 17 th -century poet Andrew Marvell who used mowing – with a scythe – to comment on the violence of the English Civil War. “Lawnmower poetry had its highpoint in