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 Autumn 2009:

A new set of poems went up on the Tube at the start of October 2009, 25 years after London Underground were first approached about putting poems in empty advertising spaces. Launched two years later, Poems on the Underground became an instant success with a surprised public. Similar projects sprang up within a year in Dublin and New York, and have since been imitated in cities across the world, from Paris to St Petersburg, San Francisco to Shanghai, Sydney to São Paolo.

The poems on display reflect the range, variety and special appeal of the programme. This set includes four from the first year of Poems on the Underground:

• a well-loved sonnet by Shakespeare ('Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’)
• a 20th-century love poem, Her Anxiety by W.B. Yeats
• This Is Just to Say by the populist American poet William Carlos Williams
• one of the most moving of World War I poems, Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon.

Also featured is Prayer by the new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy; and Indian Cooking’ by Moniza Alvi, born in Lahore but long resident in London.

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.