Poets had used naughty swear words before 1971, but Philip Larkin’s famous poem about parents really marked a watershed in twentieth-century poetry, with his colloquial and no-nonsense opening line cutting through the pretentiousness (as he saw it) of high modernism and offering something more relatable and universal.
Poets had used naughty swear words before 1971, but Philip Larkin’s famous poem about parents really marked a watershed in twentieth-century poetry, with his colloquial and no-nonsense opening line cutting through the pretentiousness (as he saw it) of high modernism and offering something more relatable and universal. The poem was published three years later in Larkin’s final collection, High Windows(1974) and is one of the most famous poems to come out of ‘the Movement’, the mid-century anti-modernist movement to which Larkin belonged.