Shelley said “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”, but politicians may be more powerful after the education secretary attacked the removal of poems by Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen from a GCSE course as “cultural vandalism” and called for their reinstatement.
Nadhim Zahawi denounced a decision by the OCR examination board to replace two works by Larkin and Owen from next year with a more diverse range of authors, to be studied as part of its GCSE English literature course.
