Every season, six poems are selected to be displayed in tube carriages across London.  Read on to see which poems are on display now, and to find out more about the history of Poems on the Underground.

For more details of Poems on the Underground in print and audio, click here.

Poems featured on the Tube for Winter/Spring 2010:

A new set of poems went up on the Tube at the start of February 2010. Posted on 3,000 Tube card spaces, this set include Science Poems which celebrate 350 years of the Royal Society.

The six poems reflect contrasting responses by Blake, Tennyson, and four contemporary poets to the astonishing scientific discoveries made between the 18th and 21st centuries. This set includes:

•Auguries of Innocence by William Blake. Blake attacked ‘The Atoms of Democritus’ and ‘Newton’s Particles of light’ as symbols of scientific materialism.

•In Memoriam by Lord Alfred Tennyson. The Victorian poet tried to come to terms with the new science of evolution and geological time in his great elegy for Arthur Hallam.

Also featured are contemporary poems about space and time, earth and the heavens, the enduring mysteries of life and death. These include In the microscope by Miroslav Holub, It looks so simple from a distance by the distinguished American/British poet Anne Stevenson, Out There by Jamie McKendrick, from Dark Matter: Poems of Space and Fulcrum/Writing a World by David Morley, from Scientific Papers (Carcanet 2002).

Click on a thumbnail to see an enlarged image of the poem:

Posters are available to buy from the Poetry Society (Education) or the London Transport Museum (+44 (0)20 7379 6344 for back copies).

About Poems on the Underground

Poems on the Underground, founded in 1986, is supported by London Underground, Arts Council England and the British Council, which distributes the posters to its offices throughout the world. Poems are selected and the programme administered by the writer Judith Chernaik and poets Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert. The British Council has supported Poems on the Underground since its inception in 1986.

Poems on the Underground has been the inspiration for similar programmes around the world: in Dublin (on the DART suburban railway) and in Adelaide, Melbourne, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, Sydney, Barcelona, Athens, Moscow, St Petersburg and most recently Shanghai. The UK Poems on the Underground have been displayed in the subway systems of Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm and Vienna. Themes have included European Poetry, Young Poems on the Underground, Commonwealth Poetry, Chinese Poetry, African Poetry and 1,000 Years of Poetry.

The British Council partners Poems on the Underground on the delivery of the overseas Poems on the Underground projects. Some examples are: as part of the British Council Brit Lit project in Oporto, Portugal poems were translated into Portuguese and displayed as Poems on the Metro in Oporto when the metro system was launched; in Shanghai the British Council worked with the local metro and UK Poems on the Underground to arrange for poems to be displayed on the metro at its launch while at the same time the posters of the Chinese poems were distributed to UK schools.

The programme goes from strength to strength, with tube card spaces increased to 3,000, thanks to a new association with TfL's Platform for Art. Sister programmes abroad (Paris's Poemes dans le Metro, New York's Poetry in Motion, among many others) continue to flourish.

Poems on the Underground, 10th Edition (2001) and New Poems on the Underground 2006, published by Orion, are available from all bookshops and directly from Orion Books. Carnival of the Animals, (Walker Books 2005) includes poems commissioned by Poems on the Underground, illustrated by Satoshi Kitamura, with a CD of music and poems performed by the Apollo Chamber Orchestra, directed by David Chernaik.