The problem with airline food (not the set-up to a bad joke) is that the vibrations on a plane trigger a nerve in our middle ear. This, according to a 2015 study from Cornell University, distorts our perceptions of taste – savoury flavours are unpleasantly enhanced, and our ability to detect sweetness is compromised. Combine that with the recycled air, which dehydrates both our olfactory senses and the food itself, and it explains why few of us have ever enjoyed a meal on a plane.
Recently I was reading an extract from a John Keats poem, “Endymion”, in a similarly unholy context: at rush hour on the Piccadilly Line on the London Underground. The podcast blasting in my ears (to drown out the screeching of the tracks), the gaudy advertisements encroaching on my peripheral vision, the cute but obstructive Labrador at my feet – all made the “sweet dreams” and “quiet breathing” of Keats’s poetic imagination rather hard to appreciate. What the airplane is to vacuum-sealed carbonara, the Tube is to poetry.
The Poems on the Underground project was launched in 1986 by the writer Judith Chernaik and poets Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert. The aim is noble – to inject a bit of truth and beauty into the daily commute – but the execution is somewhat lacking. Every month a new slew of poems are strewn across Tube carriages next to fixed advertising slots. Old favourites from Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney (along with “contemporary and emerging poets”) sit seedy and incongruous beside a smiling Tess Daly selling women’s health care vitamins, or a poster for a hair loss clinic.
A statement from the project explains that “poetry speaks to our common humanity and our shared values” (hmm), “transforming the simplest of poems into a powerful catalyst for dialogue, thought and peace”. We should not be too cynical about anyone trying to improve the public realm. But far from offering this “powerful catalyst for thought and peace”, Poems on the Underground has left the commute a land of spiritual whiplash.
An advert proposing I better myself via consumption (I’ve tried that already!) is juxtaposed with WB Yeats’s lament, “Tread softly for you tread on my dreams”. A promotion for eHarmony meets Carol Ann Duffy’s line, “Time hates love, wants love poor”. “Tired of being tired?”, an advertisement for iron supplements asks; “…in spite of all/Some shape of beauty moves away the pall”, Keats answers.
In John Berger’s oft-quoted Ways of Seeing, he contends that the moment a work of art is replicated and, say, beamed into the houses of thousands via the television, it becomes imbued with a new context: “The painting enters each viewer’s house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes.” No such romance on the Central Line. Rather than cut through the white noise and summer heat of the Underground, these glimmers of brilliance are consumed by it. Keats is not quite brought down to the level of another Uber Eats advertisement, but in the very least he is left competing for oxygen.
And this is the best-case scenario, when the poems are good. But scattered amid the corporate wasteland of adverts plugging banking apps and budget holidays are poems that reach new depths of poetic ineptitude. “How does one begin to drink the sky?” one such poem begins. “By tasting its tears, of course.” (Of course!) There is the straightforward moralising (“And off they went, my two parents/To march against the war in Iraq”). And then there’s the patronising: butterflies, for all their graces are “merely caterpillars who persevere”! It would be nice on a nursery wall.
Bad poetry cannot be improved even by the most beautiful pamphlet – and a rattling Tube carriage certainly affords these perseverant caterpillars no better showing. But jarring context can ruin even the most beautiful artwork.
As the Turner Prize winner Rachel Whiteread contended in 2017, too many public sculptures were “ill-thought about” and dumped in spaces with no consideration of context. A chilled Beaujolais makes sense in early autumn in Lyon, but will struggle to appeal during a November thunderstorm in a bar off Charing Cross Road, London, just as battered fish makes more sense in view of a harbour than in a car park on the M25. So too the tender melancholy of “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” is anathema to the sensibilities required to navigate the London Underground in rush hour.
Britain has a problem with public art, permanently vexed by the question of context. The constantly simmering culture war surrounding the Parthenon marbles in the British Museum is a perfect reflection of this. The marbles used to adorn the periphery of the Parthenon temple, bathed in Athenian sunlight; now they sit in a fluorescently lit side room in Bloomsbury. The case for their return to Greece is not one of propriety or law – how they came into whose hands and why – but an aesthetic argument: why should the famous oxen low at a British ceiling rather than the Mediterranean sky? And why is Tess Daly staring at me as I parse Shelley on the Tube?
By elevating the bad and discrediting the good, Poems on the Underground has diminished the public realm; a reminder that, at 9.37am on the Northern Line, we are worlds away from the great romantics.
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This article appears in the 17 Jul 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The American Berserk