If you have travelled on the London Underground at any time over the last 40 years, you’ll probably have noticed a poem or two. Perhaps on posters adorning the station concourse, or in tube carriages where adverts might normally be found.

These poems are often unexpected, delightful and poignant. They remind commuters of our humanness and offer travellers small moments of respite. Whether on an empty platform or in a crowded carriage, Londoners and tourists alike can be moved by the rhythms of poetry.

“I love dis great, polluted place,” says Benjamin Zephaniah in The London Breed (2001). “I sing of a world reshaped,” declares Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare with hope in I Sing of Change (1981). In A Bunch of Consolation (2023), Maura Dooley urges us “to love, to speak up, to hold steady”. A melancholic yearning for her mother’s cooking in Grace Nichols’ Like a Beacon (1984) – one of the first poems to be featured on a poster – beckons your appetite but breaks your heart.

This year Poems on the Underground has celebrated 40 years of bringing poetry to the commuting masses. The first poems to be displayed were Up in the Morning Early (1788) by Robert Burns; The Railway Children (1984) by Seamus Heaney; Like a Beacon (1984) by Grace Nichols; Ozymandias (1818) by Percy Bysshe Shelley; and This Is Just To Say (1934) by William Carlos Williams.

The project was the brainchild of the American essayist and novelist Judith Chernaik, who came up with the idea as a young academic when she moved to London in 1972 with her husband and children. The couple befriended the Barrow poets Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert and soon became part of their literary circle. The Barrow poets were a group of writers and folk musicians who got their name from selling poems from handbarrows in local markets.

The couple were invited to attend play-reading groups, and in one such gathering, the work being explored was Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Chernaik was charmed by the figure of Orlando, who hangs poems in the trees of the Forest of Arden for his love, Rosalind.

Imagining the London Underground as a real-life contemporary Forest of Arden, she asked her friends what they thought of her idea to hang some poems in the advertising spaces on the tube. Delighted by the notion, they encouraged her, and the following morning, a determined Chernaik wrote to London Transport (later TfL).

To her amazement London Transport replied and was interested in her proposal. She secured an Arts Council Grant in 1985 and the rest is literary history: four decades of sharing poetry with the public though Poems on the Underground.

Literary academic Anna Barton has observed that in As You Like It, “the Forest of Arden is a place of freedom, transformation and love – but also hardship for the shepherds who work there”. But if Shakespeare was the inspiration for Chernaik, a scholar of Romantic poetry, the motivation came from her study of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.

Finding meaning amid the tumult

Keats, who died at just 26, worried in his letters whether he would be read, while Shelly believed poetry had the power to change the world. Here was a project that could accomplish both things. Indeed, joined by Gerard Benson and Cicley Herbert who became co-founders of the initiative, the three brought to millions of passengers a wide range of poetry from the past and present, and written by poets from all over the world.

Today Cherniak’s co-directors are the poets Imtiaz Dharker and George Szirtes; after the death of Benson in 2014, Herbert stepped back. The programme has been so successful it has been replicated in cities such as New York, Paris, Beijing, Dublin, Moscow, Shanghai and Warsaw.

In London, the tube rumbles to the rhythm of the best poetry in the world. One of my favourites is Oscar Wilde’s Symphony in Yellow, a poem first published in 1889.

An omnibus across the bridge

Crawls like a yellow butterfly,

And, here and there, a passer-by

Shows like a little restless midge.

When I first saw it on the tube, the poem transported me to the London of the 1890s. In the 19th century, omnibus routes were colour coded – how ingenious of Wilde to sing of the bus as a yellow butterfly. The design for the poem, which included an illustration depicting Oscar Wilde himself, made me aware of another aspect of the Poems on the Underground: their visual impact that comes from beautiful typography, use of colour and layout.

The poet Arthur Symons wrote in 1909 of the dehumanisation of passengers travelling on the Underground: “The creatures that we see now in the machines are hardly to be called human beings, so are they disfigured out of all recognition, in order that they may go fast enough not to see anything themselves.”

For the last 40 years, Poems on the Underground has done the exact opposite: it has continually reminded passengers of their humanity. And Symons would probably have been thrilled to know A Tune (1899), his poem about the persistence of memory, would one day be displayed on the tube.

Seamus Heaney, one of the first poets to be featured, wrote to Chernaik in 1999 to say: “I admire you for keeping the underground poems a priority; it is worth doing and has made a difference, I am sure, to the life-worth of poetry for many people. Blessings on the work.”

As the Poems on the Underground archive at the University of Cambridge attests, the project is much loved by the public and poets alike. It is a powerful example of the uplifting effect of the arts, and how bringing art into everyday public spaces can transform the experience of the people using them.