The Case for Memorizing Poetry


It was once common for educated people in the West to memorize large bodies of poetry. Memorization of literature was normal and expected. It has, however, fallen out of fashion. Brad Leithauser, a poet and professor of writing, thinks that this departure was a great loss:

My late colleague Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, used to appall his students by requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester. He felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972.

Brodsky was a nonpareil in various ways, not least in being the only teacher I knew who continued to smoke during class as the air-purifying nineties rolled around. He loved to recite poetry. The words emerged through smoke, and a thick Russian accent, but the conviction and import were unmistakable: to take a poem to heart was to know it by heart. [...]

The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”

Link -via Althouse | Photo: Shakespeare Love Mug on sale at the NeatoShop

Should we memorize poetry?



Comments (0)

If we lived in Switzerland and I really wanted to kill my husband, all I would have to do is order this service! He would drop dead of a heart attack on the spot. I think "It" kind of blew it for our generation and clowns.
I'm not frightened of clowns, but I find this incredibly creepy.
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Ok, this is just for fun, since I'm logged in as someone I find quite annoying. Why do you hate America, or is it Americans?... and "we don't eat 'bacon' here"??? WTF, your opinion is like your a**hole, no one wants to hear it.
I enjoy Neatorama, I know everyone can comment as they feel fit about the content of an article, but what is the cause of Max Powers' blatant anti-Americanism???
Yours truly. (not) Max Power
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Dear #5,

yes, it's true, we do not eat bacon around here. As much as I would like to decline that sentence to something that is more suitable of your opinionism, I think it would be easier if you just bought a machine gun and showed the world your outrage about the sheer existence of people who, to cut this short and execute a nicely cynical change in style, weigh less than 500 pounds.

Yours faithfully,

Max Power
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