Who, when travelling on the London Underground, hasn’t gone up the escalators with a spring in their step after reading Adrian Mitchell’s Celia Celia (“When I walk along High Holborn / I think of you with nothing on”) or been soothed by Carol Ann Duffy’s Prayer? This month Poems on the Underground celebrates its 40th anniversary.
Inspired by a reading of As You Like It, Judith Chernaik, an American writer living in London, conceived a plan to scatter poetry across the underground as the love-sick Orlando hangs sonnets through the Forest of Arden. Her simple idea took root below the sewers and spread to cities across the world. Poetry in Motion launched in New York in 1992, and today poems can be found on public transport in Dublin, Paris, Beijing, Shanghai, Warsaw and Moscow.
Ms Chernaik, now 91, is still the editor, joined by poets Imtiaz Dharker and George Szirtes. Six poems, spanning history and geography, are chosen three times a year. A selection of winter poems will launch on 9 February, with work from contemporary British poets Rachel Boast and Blake Morrison and a haiku by the 18th-century Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa.
The anonymous 15th-century poem I Have a Gentil Cock ruffled feathers in 1990 and there were calls to ban Jo Shapcott’s Quark for the word “bollocks” in 1999. But nothing could derail the scheme’s success. During lockdown a website was set up to ensure that commuters got their poetry fix, and hopeful new poems greeted them when they returned to work. In 2024, Poems on the Underground was given an archive at Cambridge University.
From the earliest Edwardian posters and those by Paul Nash and Man Ray in the 1930s, to Harry Beck’s iconic map and David Gentleman’s 1979 Charing Cross station mural, Transport for London has a long tradition of art and design. Poetry and art bring humanity underground. They allow nature and imagination into this subterranean labyrinth of civil engineering.
The tube is a liminal place, one of physical proximity and anonymity. We sit in rows or cling to straps, staring at our phones or ads, closer to our fellow humans perhaps than at any time in the day, yet determined to ignore each other. The poems appear in commercial spaces, but aren’t trying to sell us anything. They reach millions of travellers each day – free of charge.
Some might argue that Shakespeare and Wordsworth are debased by sitting cheek by jowl with adverts for vitamins and dating apps, that poetry’s rhythms jar with the screech of brakes, its lyricism crushed by rush hour. And not all poetry can please everyone.
As Seamus Heaney wrote, “no lyric ever stopped a tank”, but it can stop us in our tracks. In less than a minute, a poem can transport us out of our own lives. Studies have shown that a daily microdose of art can boost our wellbeing. Heaney summed it up in a card to Ms Chernaik in 1999: the project has contributed “to the life‑worth of poetry for many people”.
Poems on the Underground is as much a part of the contemporary UK cultural landscape as Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth or the Angel of the North. It is a credit to Transport for London, the Arts Council and the British Council that they have enabled the project to flourish. Deep below the capital’s streets, this is public art at its highest. The poems are tiny lights in a dark tunnel.
