GOT POETRY?
By Jim Holt
A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred
poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan
lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are
within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another
guy on an invisible cellphone.
This may seem eccentric, not to say masochistic. If you are a baby boomer like me (or older), your high
school English teacher probably forced you to learn some poetry by heart for class recitation. How we
howled in protest! What was the point of memorizing Shakespeare’s “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?” sonnet or — in Middle English, no less! — the first 18 lines of “The Canterbury Tales”? Our teacher
could never answer this question to our satisfaction; the best she could do was some drivel about our
feeling “culturally confident.” But memorize them we did, in big painful chunks, by rote repetition. (There
is torture lurking in the very word “rote,” which is conjectured to come from the Latin rota, meaning
“wheel.”)
A few lucky types seem to memorize great swaths of poetry without even trying. George Orwell said that
when a verse passage “has really rung the bell” — as the early T. S. Eliot invariably did for him — he
could remember 20 or 30 lines after a single reading. Samuel Johnson, according to Boswell, had a similar
mnemonic gift. Christopher Hitchens — who carries around in his head a small anthology of verse, all of
which, as his friend Ian McEwan says, is “instantly neurologically available” — also seems to absorb
poems by osmosis. (Or maybe he swots them up late at night after his dinner-party guests have all passed
out.) Richard Howard once told me that he eased into the memorization habit as a child, when his parents
rewarded him with a dime for each poem he learned.
For the rest of us, the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a
couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I’ve already got.
At the moment, I’m 22 lines into Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month
to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I’ll be the possessor of a nice big piece of
poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.
The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. You cling to the meter and rhyme scheme
(if there is one), declaiming the lines in a sort of sing-songy way without worrying too much about what
they mean. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance.
You begin to feel the tension between the abstract meter of the poem — the “duh DA duh DA duh DA duh
DA duh DA” of iambic pentameter, say — and the rhythms arising from the actual sense of the words.
(Part of the genius of Yeats or Pope is the way they intensify meaning by bucking against the meter.) It’s a
physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out
loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of
reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano
sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling
the composer’s emotions. And with poetry you don’t need a piano.
That’s my case for learning poetry by heart. It’s all about pleasure. And it’s a cheap pleasure. Between the
covers of any decent anthology you have an entire sea to swim in. If you don’t have one left over from your
college days, any good bookstore, new or used, will offer an embarrassment of choices for a few bucks —
Oxford, Penguin, Norton, etc. Or you might try Essentiual Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read
Aloud (Norton, $29.95), edited by the former United States poet laureate Robert Pinsky.
But which poems to memorize? I started with Auden’s “This Lunar Beauty” — a little lyric that Stephen
Spender once said was the most beautiful thing in all of Auden. Next I tried Robert Browning’s dramatic
monologue “My Last Duchess” — a Nabokov novel compressed into 56 lines. Browning, although not
quite a first-rate poet, proved to be especially fun to memorize because of his exotic vocabulary and jawbreaking diction. For sheer length, the most ambitious poem I’ve tackled is Browning’s “Childe Roland to
the Dark Tower Came” (a favorite, as it happens, of Stephen King). At 204 lines, it takes 10 minutes to get
through — just the time it takes me to walk from my apartment to the Chinese laundry.
By now, my mental treasury of verse pretty much spans everything from Chaucer up to the present.
(Tennyson was the last major gap, which I’m just now plugging.) There’s a heavy concentration of
Shakespeare, Keats and Yeats (whose symbolic hocus-pocus finally makes some sense to me), plenty of
delightful warhorses like “To His Coy Mistress” and “Kubla Khan” and a good bit of light verse (like a
long poem about a duck-billed platypus that becomes a brilliant diplomat only to resign in disgrace after
laying an egg). Although I’m a little thin on contemporary verse, one of the best poems I’ve learned by
heart is Richard Wilbur’s “Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” Its delicate rhythms at first proved
rebarbative to my memory, but when I finally got it down I was so delighted with it that I wrote Wilbur a
fan letter. He wrote back, saying that he always advised his students to memorize poems: “If one is delayed
in a bus terminal, or sitting in a foxhole, it’s wonderful to have an inner anthology to say over, yet again, in
one’s mind.”
One should be skeptical, though, of some of the alleged advantages cited by champions of poetry
memorization. “I wonder if anyone who has memorized a lot of poetry . . . can fail to write coherent
sentences and paragraphs,” Robert Pinsky once said. Well, responded David Bromwich, just take a look at
the autobiography of Marlon Brando, who memorized heaps of Shakespeare.
Are there cognitive benefits? I sometimes feel that my mnemonic horsepower is increasing, but that’s
probably an illusion. “Memorizing poetry does seem to make people a bit better at memorizing poetry,”
Geoffrey Nunberg has observed, “but there’s no evidence that the skill carries over to other tasks.”
Nor, as I have found, will memorizing poetry make you more popular. Rather the reverse. No one wants to
hear you declaim it. Almost no one, anyway. I do have one friend, a Wall Street bond-trader, who can’t get
enough of my recitations. He takes me to the Grand Havana Cigar Club, high above Midtown Manhattan,
and sits rapt as I intone, “The unpurged images of day recede. . . .” He calls to one of the stunningly pretty
waitresses. “Come over here and listen to my friend recite this Yeats poem.” Oh dear.
The grandest claim for memorizing poetry is made by Clive James, himself a formidable repository of
memorized verse. In his book Cultural Amnesia, James declares that “the future of the humanities as a
common possession depends on the restoration of a simple, single ideal: getting poetry by heart.” A noble
sentiment. I just wish that James had given us some reason for thinking it was true.
I don’t have one myself, but I hope that I have at least dispelled three myths.
Myth No. 1: Poetry is painful to memorize. It is not at all painful. Just do a line or two a day.
Myth No. 2: There isn’t enough room in your memory to store a lot of poetry. Bad analogy. Memory is a
muscle, not a quart jar.
Myth No. 3: Everyone needs an iPod. You do not need an iPod. Memorize poetry instead.
New York Times Book Review
5 April 2009
A Man Goes Into a Bar, See, and Recites: “The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strained”
By Robert Pinsky
Poetry is, among other things, a technology for remembering. Like the written alphabet and the printing
press and the digital computer, it is an invention to help and extend memory. The most obvious examples
are mnemonic verses ("Thirty days hath September. . . .") or genealogical and property records like those
chanted by the masterly griots Alex Haley consults in "Roots." Language that takes on certain striking
physical attributes (rhyme being only one such possibility) becomes not only memorable but also
memorizable.
But this fact may touch our lives far more profoundly than jingles for remembering how many days there
are in June. The buried conduits among memory and emotion and the physical sounds of language may
touch our inner life every day, with a subterranean reach as powerful in its way as the art of the griot.
Poetry, a form of language far older than prose, is under our skins.
Any room full of Americans has more poetry in it than they may suppose, in their memories. Even a
crowded elevator could probably collaborate to produce a fairly good-sized anthology of interesting verse.
This collection would include nursery rhymes, of course, and naughty limericks, and let's allow a section of
memorized and memorable words by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Bob Dylan, David Byrne, Salt-n-Pepa and
lyricists whose words are memorized by many who cannot identify the author by name, like Johnny Mercer
and Mitchell Parish.
But that is not all. I have tried this experiment with various groups, including business people and high
school students, and people surprise themselves. Depending on their religion, they might know hymns,
some of which are also excellent poems. Once they begin helping one another, collaborating and
correcting, they might produce a passable if imperfect version of a Shakespeare sonnet like 116 ("Let me
not to the marriage of true minds"). On two separate occasions a stranger in a bar, when told what I do, has
recited to me: once, Portia's "The quality of mercy is not strained" speech from "The Merchant of Venice";
the other time, the opening of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," where the plowman plods
his weary way home "and leaves the world to darkness and to me."
Memorized gobbets may have been force-fed by a teacher once. Groaning and wincing, but not without
some affection, the group in the elevator (depending on the ages of its members) might produce such
chestnuts left over from school; not only Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," but maybe some of FitzGerald's
"Rubaiyat," or at least a stanza of A. E. Housman:
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
In the same category are such second-best but not chopped-liver poems by Robert Frost as "Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening" or "Fire and Ice." And it wouldn't be impossible for someone to thrill the rest
by doing at least part of Frost's "Putting in the Seed," "The Oven Bird" or the cadences of "To Earthward":
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear:
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things
The flow of – was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?
Or some devastating tune from Emily Dickinson:"As imperceptibly as Grief," or "There's a certain Slant of
light," or
The difference between Despair
And Fear – is like the One
Between the instant of a Wreck –
And when the Wreck has been
The mind is smooth – no Motion –
Contented as the Eye
Upon the Forehead of a Bust –
That knows – it cannot see –
Somewhere around this level of conviction, the groaning and wincing, and even the embarrassment of
performance, are subdued by something else. When one person recites from memory and we others listen,
the quality of attention has a distinctive, special quality. I have witnessed this peculiar quiet many times; it
happens reliably, without consultation, unanimously, like cattle turning their backs to the wind.
At this point, one kind of person will sigh that they just don't write them like they used to, or lament the
ascendancy of free verse. But that is not what I mean at all. Tags of Eliot like the beginning of "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are in many of our heads – and the fact that we don't know exactly what to do
with such tags is my point in a way. Getting something by heart is an intuitive, bodily event, and there is an
animal quality to the way free verse lines, too, get into the memory and reside there to fill some peculiar
human appetite. Without analysis or anatomizing, many people have memorized at least the ending, though
maybe not perfectly, of Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man":
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking – John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness surrounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going
Or it might be a bit of Wallace Stevens: something from "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," or the
free verse that booms and swoops as excitingly as any iambic pentameter through "The Snow Man." There
is something in the way the words fall, a certain bodily pleasure in re-enacting them.
Interestingly, it does not matter at a certain level whether the memorizing has been forced by some teacher
or was willed by oneself or happened involuntarily, by sheer bodily force of poetry. The words and phrases
become like family, part of us beyond mere judgment, and beyond liking or revulsion. A friend of mine
gave her class of college freshmen in "Introduction to Poetry" the ingenious first assignment of finding a
poem they hated and writing a brief essay explaining, in detail, why. I think she expected difficult stuff
from the pages of magazines. To her great surprise, five or six out of a group of 17 chose the same object of
loathing: William Carlos Williams's once innocuous little poem about so much depending upon the red
wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens. Why that poem? Clearly they had been made
to discuss it in high school.
And yet if any of those students had even inadvertently memorized the 16 words of "The Red
Wheelbarrow" back in high school, it had performed an important function of poetry for them: it had
entered their memories. I think most readers of poetry can come close to reciting Williams's "This Is Just to
Say" ("I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox / and which / you were probably / saving / for
breakfast," etc.) or my favorite of this kind by Williams, "To a Poor Old Woman":
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
they taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
The second stanza here is a little lesson, by the way, in what lines are: a form of attention. The poem's four
repetitions of the homely phrase "They taste good to her" are good practice for hearing poetry and the kind
of attention its rhythms provide. The phrase appears first in its whole prosaic form, then the analytic music
of cadence and line cut across the sentence to emphasize the different, intricate currents of syntax: stressing
first the predicate adjective "good"; then the verb "taste" with the pronoun "they" as its subject (the word
"plums" not appearing until two stanzas later); and at the end of the stanza the isolated phrase "good to
her." When the five-word sentence comes back in the last line, fitted entire into a line again, it is
transformed -- made indelible by the ineffable work of rhythm and repetition.
This work is best perceived if the poem is read aloud, allowing the line ending to create emphasis, not an
unidiomatic pause after each line as though the reader has choked for an instant. (This principle applies
equally to Williams's free verse and to the lines from Frost quoted earlier.) It may be that our education in
poetry has devoted too much energy to poems as objects for saying clever things about, and not enough to
the apprehension of poems through the basic processes of reading aloud, memorizing, even writing out
longhand or typing personal copies. The pleasures of having a poem by heart, if not necessarily always
greater than those of analysis, are more fundamental.
With some such idea in mind, I have for several years asked the students in my classes to have ready some
poem, any poem they choose, by memory. The arrangement is that I occasionally call on someone at
random, and that glancing down at a text is allowed. Most of their choices, like the examples I have used
here, have been very brief -- nearly nothing compared to the long swatches of Milton or Wordsworth
people used to have in their heads. But I have been surprised: a long Rilke elegy in translation, a long
stretch of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," Fulke Greville's elegy for Sir Philip Sidney.
Once, late to my own lecture in an introductory poetry class at the University of California, Berkeley, I was
annoyed to find myself running past one of my students who was idling along with the slack gaze of the
overpartied. When she came into the room several minutes after me, I took the teacher's revenge and called
on her to give us a poem from memory. She stood up, still looking less than half awake, and began, "I have
met them at close of day / Coming with vivid faces / From counter or desk among gray / Eighteenthcentury houses," speaking the 80 lines of Yeats's "Easter 1916," with the passionate restraint of someone
who understands what is being said, and how; and then she sat down to the spontaneous applause of the
hall.
This pleasure of possession – possession of and possession by, as the dead poet's syllables about some
political deaths in Ireland are formed by the lips of the living student in California – is a model of culture,
and as such it has its ambiguous political meanings. In a smaller class, an advanced poetry seminar, I raised
the subject of memorized lines and we discovered that nearly everyone in the room (7 out of 10, say) could
recite by heart the opening lines of Chaucer's General Prologue to the "Canterbury Tales." Our group
included a young woman who grew up in the Philippines, a young man from the African-American
neighborhoods of Washington, and another young woman who went to various American schools overseas
as her family moved from one Foreign Service post to another.
The strangeness of these various people in their 20's moving their tongues and lips, almost involuntarily, in
sequences devised by a short, clever, middle-class Englishman thinking about springtime so many hundreds
of years before felt like the beginning of a thousand possible conversations. The successful imperialism of
two English-speaking countries was involved, as was our own country's Anglophilia -- and so forth. And on
some level this mutual possession seemed deeply expressive of the animal we are, an animal that
communicates by elaborate systems of grunts; also, a creature that with finger rings and bracelets, and with
tattooed skin or ornaments that pierce the body, and with repeated patterns of sound, chooses to mark itself
with art intended to endure.
New York Times Book Review
September 25, 1994