Language Matters | Poetry is a necessity we can afford today, and public displays make it easier to absorb
Lee Kuan Yew’s maxim that poetry was an unaffordable luxury was of its time. These days it is widely appreciated, and not just in Singapore
Poetry is “a luxury we cannot afford”, Singapore’s founding prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, said many years ago. He intended it to be a maxim for the then-fledgling nation to focus on matters more pressing and of greater practical value for its survival.
Yet poetry’s worth is widely recognised as surpassing luxury.
On a different continent, poetry became a companion to the daily commute, with poems – classic, new, translated – displayed in London Underground trains and stations. The subway operator’s first collection appeared in January 1986.
The “Poems on the Underground” project is nearly 40 years old now and hundreds of poems have been displayed for people going about their everyday to ponder, find amusement in, and be inspired.
“We were small and thought we knew nothing / Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires / In the shiny pouches of raindrops …” – The Railway Children, Seamus Heaney; Poems on the Underground, January 1986.
In Singapore, in the same vein, “Poems on the MRT” was launched on the Mass Rapid Transit network, initially with six poems on in-train panels in 1995; there have been several iterations of the project over the years.