How the poems get onto the London Underground
Poetry in motion – If poetry has any kind of public face these days, you suspect it can be found not in the spectacle of poets laureate writing for national newspapers, but in the poems displayed on Tube carriage walls alongside adverts for skin cream and vitamin supplements.
Photo by Ruth Gledhill
This celebration of the Poems on the Underground scheme’s fortieth anniversary (6 January and BBC Sounds) brings together a wide variety of complementary – and indeed complimentary – voices.
When did Britain stop being a poetry-loving nation? Half a century ago, the world seemed full of popular reciters, with grandparents spontaneously launching into renditions of “The boy stood on the burning deck” and Sir John Betjeman voyaging around Metroland for television. If poetry has any kind of public face these days, you suspect it can be found not in the spectacle of poets laureate writing for national newspapers, but in the poems displayed on Tube carriage walls alongside adverts for skin cream and vitamin supplements.
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