Forty years ago, Northern English poet Harrison published a powerful work inspired by vandalised gravestones in his hometown Leeds. Then, when it was screened on TV in 1987, a national furore erupted.

"FOUR LETTER TV POEM FURY" thundered the front page of one British newspaper, condemning the "cascade of expletives". "FROM BAD TO VERSE" was the headline of another article, that quoted a Conservative Member of Parliament questioning whether the said poem "serves any artistic purpose whatsoever". And a group of particularly exercised MPs called for a debate in the House of Commons.

The furore was about a poem called V by northern English poet Tony Harrison – a work inspired by vandalised gravestones in his hometown Leeds – which was originally published in January 1985, but really became a cause célèbre when it was screened on national television in the UK two years later, in November 1987.

It is not often a poem becomes a hot topic of conversation among the general public. The last time it happened was four years ago when Amanda Gorman read her poem The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden's presidential inauguration, although the poet's youth and outfit excited as much comment as her verse. Before that, it was WH Auden's Funeral Blues, after it featured in the hit 1994 romcom Four Weddings and a Funeral.

But if it is unusual for a poem to escape the confines of the world of literature, it's virtually unheard of for one to provoke angry newspaper headlines, and prompt politicians to demand action and members of the public to furiously call TV channels.

V had its origins in a visit by Harrison to Holbeck Cemetery in Beeston, Leeds, in May 1984. The cemetery stands on a hill – beneath which there are worked-out mine seams – and overlooks both Elland Road, home of Leeds United Football Club, and the University of Leeds, where Harrison, a poet and playwright, had studied Classics and Linguistics. Harrison, there to tend his parents' graves, found the cemetery strewn with beer cans and gravestones defaced by spray-painted graffiti – four-letter words, racist abuse, swastikas and a series of "V" letters. The nature of some of the graffiti suggested football fans were responsible.

At this time, unemployment was soaring, and went on to reach 11.9% later that year, a level not seen in the UK since 1971 – and not seen since. The previous year, an award-winning BBC drama, The Boys from the Blackstuff, about unemployed tarmac-layers in Liverpool, had captured the zeitgeist and made a huge impact. The Miners' Strike had started some weeks earlier. In fact, the country was deeply divided under a polarising Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher. In the vandalism and the spray-painted daubings, Harrison saw further evidence of societal division, and it gave him the idea for his poem.

Harrison was, at this point, an established and well-respected poet, playwright and translator. He had published several volumes of verse and been the resident dramatist at the National Theatre, while his 1973 translation of Molière's The Misanthrope had won great acclaim.

On 24 January 1985, V was published in the London Review of Books.

It consists of 112 four-line stanzas, or quatrains, with an ABAB rhyming scheme, the same form as Thomas Gray's celebrated 18th-Century poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which Harrison sought to evoke in contrast with his own work.

The "V" of the title stands for "versus" – which is also a pun on "verses" – but maybe also for "victory", and perhaps it is further intended to refer to the two-fingered "V sign" gesture considered rude in British culture.

One verse reads:

These Vs are all the versuses of life

from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White

and (as I've known to my cost) man v. wife,

Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right.

The poem imagines the poet engaging in a dialogue with the person who has defaced the graves, and it features the obscenities and racist epithets used in the graffiti.

"We didn't........

© BBC