The excitement and frustrations of city life have inspired poets from 18th-century Grub Street to the 50s Beats and modern-day rappers. But can poetry actually help us make cities better?

I see the F train’s twin headlights blooming into the station.

When I close my eyes, its warm wind sweeps hair from my face,

the way my grandmother did with her hands, to see my eyes.”

The feeling created by these words, from American poet Erika Meitner’s 2010 poetry collection Ideal Cities, will ring familiar to nearly all who live the urban experience. But the relief of seeing a pair of headlights peek through the tunnel, or the sensation of the hot air of a passing train, are so mundane they can often go uncelebrated save for a fleeting moment.

Poetry like Meitner’s can give us a space to sing the praises and frustrations of the cities we live in. But can it actually help us make those cities better? Can poetry be a way to experience and understand our environment more richly?

Many people’s first formal interaction with poetry – beyond nursery rhymes, at least – tends to be centred on the Romantic-era poets such as Blake, Keats, Wordsworth or Shelley. This particular tradition is known for being rooted in a celebration of the beauty of the natural world, typified in classics such as Keats’ Ode to Autumn (“While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day / And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue”), and Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind:

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams

The blue Mediterranean, where he lay

Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams”

So perhaps it’s not surprising that over time, poetry has been less associated with train tracks, smog, and bridges and more with brooks, brambles, and fields.

However, east London-based poet Tom Chivers, whose work focuses heavily on the urban experience and who has made a series of poetic audio walks down London’s lost rivers, says that emphasis is misplaced.

There is this energy and aggression and speed in a city that lends itself to poetry Tom Chivers

“The city resists nostalgic forms of poetry that have been handed down to us in various traditions,” Chivers says. “There is this energy and aggression and speed in a city that lends itself to poetry. We are surrounded by language, whether it’s place names, digital signs, advertising hoardings or the voices of market traders – it’s everywhere. Cities are built with language.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I see the F train’s twin headlights blooming into the station.’ (Erika Meitner) Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

South London poet Inua Ellams focuses on poetry and the urban experience, specifically from an immigrant perspective (Ellams was born in Nigeria). He writes in his poem Directions:

You know the wild bushes at the back of the flat, the ones that scrape the kitchen window the ones that struggle for soil or water, and fail where the train tracks scar the ground?

He runs walking poetry workshops with the “experiential travel” company SideStory, during which anyone can try turning their attention to the poetic undercurrent of the city. At the Southbank Centre’s Poetry Library, which houses the most comprehensive collection of poetry in the UK, Ellams tells me that “poems are 3D portraits of the world using as few words as possible”. A shortcut to creating that portrait, he says, is by focusing on the senses.

This shift in focus from the cerebral to the physical feels particularly apt in the urban setting, where we are bombarded with all manner of sensory assaults – from unsavoury fumes to dewy morning light and the smell of croissants. Taken as a whole, this can be overwhelming; but embraced intentionally, with a kind of poetic mindfulness, these common threads of the urban experience can take on a whole new meaning.

One urban poetic tradition that revels in that act of noticing is that of the flâneur, or the 19th-century wanderer, personified by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, who once wistfully wrote: “The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart.” In her book about the subversive tradition of female flâneurs, Flaneuse, Lauren Elkin writes of the way Virginia Woolf practiced this art in her Bloomsbury neighbourhood:

The form of a city changes faster, alas, than the human heart Charles Baudelaire

“Woolf reminds us that there is something physically absorbing that keys us into the throb of the city, transformed by the quality of the light, of the air, of the road … The city, [Woolf] wrote in her diary in 1928, was forever ‘attract[ing], stimulat[ing]’ her, giving her ‘a play and a story and a poem’.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hip-hop lyrics are a distinct kind of urban poetry. Photograph: Allstar/Universal/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Ellams echoes this sentiment. “So much of the urban experience is going somewhere,” he says. “Meandering is not celebrated.” By slowing down, we notice the kinds of poetic details that can help us transcend the normal thrum of daily life.

The 18th-century poet Alexander Pope was a practitioner of a slightly more provocative kind of urban poetry – he gained notoriety for his habit of cussing and satirising his adversaries in verse. In his four-part poem The Dunciad, Pope publicly lampoons his literary and political rivals and name-drops the “Grub Street race” – the bohemian neighbourhood that is now Milton Street near the Barbican in London, where poets and hacks used to compete in public readings for literary prestige.

Live poetry readings in cities went on to become a key element of the legend of the Beat generation, particularly a famous reading in 1955 at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, where Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure and Gary Snyder (among others) came to the attention of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose offer to publish Ginsberg’s Howl kicked off their fame. Today, modern-day Grub Streets and Beat-style events continue to pop up all over London, from open mics, spoken word nights and readings such as The Poetry Society’s Poetry Unplugged.

Indeed, Pope’s disses are of a style that’s similar to what we today might call a rap battle. Hip-hop lyrics are a distinctly urban kind of poetry that has exploded in the past 30 years, rising mainly from the experience of black Americans in cities but increasingly to be found in metropolises worldwide. Though the line between rap and poetry depends heavily on who you ask (linguist, literary critic, poet), and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s declaration that TS Elliot invented rap is even more tin-eared than his music, it is not hard to see the same contemplative urban spirit in Eminem’s film 8 Mile as in some of the best classic urban poetry.

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Another successful project similarly proves that urban poetry needn’t be intimidating or elitist, but simply accessible: Poems on the Underground, a public art project funded by the Arts Council and now celebrating its 30th year, has seen 600 poems grace the inside carriages of the Tube and been emulated from New York to Shanghai. “It’s a little embarrassing to have created a public art project that is so widely liked,” says Judith Chernaik, co-creator and curator.

“The tradition of poetry appearing in parks, in buildings – this has gone on a long time. There was nothing original about [our project] except that it was on the Tube,” she says. “However, in such a commercialised world, I think there’s a kind of implicit pleasure in the poems just being there, not doing anything to you, and not forcing you to do anything. People can read it or not. Nobody is shouting. It isn’t a competition – just an offering.”

In a modern world where hyper-connectivity often results in disconnection from our immediate surroundings, creating the space to explore poetry can make us more reflective and engaged citizens. With poetry, the city becomes a place where we meander, both physically and mentally – or as Chernaik puts it, “be lifted up to another world, even when we’re underground”.

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