London is a poet's playground

From Seamus Heaney's

Through plague and war, pestilence and potential pandemic, poets have looked to London to capture the spirit of the age. London's many moods have made her a difficult, but ultimately a most rewarding, muse to serve. Through the centuries, poets have used their myriad perceptions of the capital and her inhabitants to comment on religious fervour, political uprising, lost love or personal suffering.

The city has always fascinated and fostered poets. Consider Medieval poet Thomas Usk's words (formerly attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer) in
The Testament of Love: 'The citye of London that is to me so dere and swete, in which I was forthgrowen; and more kyndely love have I to
that place than to any other in yerth.' Alongside helping to standardise the London dialect, Geffrey Chaucer, the son of a London wine merchant, like Usk, was a poet embedded in the life of the city and able to bring to life wickedly its occupants and visitors.

At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, the poet has the cast of The Canterbury Tales assemble before their pilgrimage. Walk round contemporary Southwark and you can still sense the ribald energy inherent in the city's make-up.

But the city's poetic tradition has generated more than simple admiration. William Blake, poet, painter and printmaker, captured the city in the throes of industrial revolution. For some, his poem London is a social protest, for others a response to a tradition of biblical prophecy. Whichever it may be, there is no denying its electrifying ability to convey the degradation of a city in turmoil as he responds to the 'marks of weakness, marks of woe' found in its inhabitants. As if commenting on the complexities of city life, London is one of the few poems in Blake's Songs of Experience that does not have a counterpart in his Songs of Innocence.

But London has also shown herself able to provide sanctuary to poets who choose to dwell within her and her outlying districts. Think of Keats' house in Hampstead where he lived from 1818 to 1820 and composed Ode to a Nightingale. Or, a century earlier, of Alexander Pope who, in 1719, on the proceeds of his translation of Homer, moved to a villa at Twickenham complete with its own grotto.

It is not always Londoners themselves who have given the most accurate portrait of the city and its power to amaze. In September 1802, William Wordsworth was passing through en route to meeting his former lover and the mother of his child, Annette Vallon, in France.

His sonnet Composed Upon Westminster Bridge offers a moment of expansive, life-affirming clarity as it provides a dazzling view of the glittering city in the moments before it wakes. 'Earth has not anything to show more fair,' as Wordsworth describes for us, 'The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie Open unto the fields and to the sky.' It is as if the city, caught off guard, catches the poet and both stare back amazed. The poet, so deeply linked to the English Lake District, declares he 'never felt a calm so deep' as in the sleeping heart of the capital.

For other poets London has proved a more dangerous and damaged beast. A place filled with ghosts and echoes. A former teacher at Highgate School (where future Poet Laureate John Betjeman was a pupil), TS Eliot was recovering from a nervous disorder when he conceived of his masterpiece The Waste Land. Perhaps his most arresting image is of the capital 'under the brown fog of a winter dawn'.

As 'a crowd flowed over London Bridge', the disembodied voice in the poem declares 'so many, I had not thought death had undone so many'. London, and the poets who are the voice of its consciousness, seem to suffer equally in the aftermath of the mechanised excesses of the First World War.

More recently, poets laureate and Nobel have shown us how to delight in London. When commissioned to write a poem for the Trade Union Congress, Andrew Motion chose to centre his work In a Perfect World on a walk along the Thames. The stroll along the river path from Richmond to Westminster was taken 'just for the pleasure of light filling my head, just for the breeze like a hand taptaptap-tapping the small of my back'. The poem becomes a meditation on the meaning of liberty as Motion celebrates the commonplace freedoms the city can offer. It identifies a rare moment of the ideal in the real world and a London where 'The buttery sun kept casting its light on everything equally'.