I can't stand Will's When Icicles Hang by the Wall, which I can still recite, because I was forced to learn it at school. It was probably Greasy Joan that killed it for me, and I resent the space the poem occupies in my brain - I need that space for other stuff, dammit! :rolleyes:

I memorized at least 30,000 lines, and it's easy when your brain is a sponge. Much more difficult now. It did me a world of good.

30,000 lines! Wow! That's positively Roman. How many lines would an entire Shkespeare play be? I don't know how much of the Holy Koran little muslims have to learn. But that's not poetry, is it? I speak from ignorance. It is in verses after all. Isn't it?

I'm on Maui just now and, with my wife, was recently a guest on "Celtic music with Hamish" on the local Mana'o Radio station.

Hamish Burgess, bagpiper, Celtic artist, and host of the show, has an appreciation for poetry and was a friend of the late Liam Clancy. He told me that Liam was a great one for entertaining people with poetry recited from memory, and he sent me this link to a recorded Clancy recitation of a poem written by Padraic Fallon.

I think memorization helps a poet convey a poem emotionally, and that this recitation is a good example of that. I can't see Clancy standing up in a roomful of people, picking up a book, and reading like this.

John

Edna Millay claimed that she memorized Keats' "Eve of Saint Agnes" and "Lamia", so anything is possible.

There's memorization, and there's effective oral delivery, and there's the undeniable usefulness of the first for the second. (Tom Clancy's delivery of "O'Driscoll" ("The Hosts of the Air") is the canonical performance as far as I'm concerned, and I have an old LP of him doing it live in concert.) But this thread is about memorization, not delivery.

Having poems by heart means that you have access to at least some poems always, no matter what the circumstances. It makes it easier to call up examples to demonstrate points in teaching or critique. It provides comfort, or food for thought, when you need it. Since nearly all of what I have by heart is metrical it's of a piece with the music I have by heart, a part of the ongoing rhythm of living. I wish I found it easier to commit free verse to memory, because I'd be richer for it.

So I'd say the best reason to memorize is our own private pleasure. It seems to me that teachers could encourage memorization without mixing it up with recitation, since there are some students who are defeated by even private recitation in the teacher's office.

Oral delivery of poems is important too--it's the best developer of the ear that really teaches meter--but I think we err if we mix it up with memorization. The two are different sources of wealth.

I've been doing this for 20-odd years, and no student has ever been "defeated" by it in any way. The recitation part is simply practice, and with the right classroom atmosphere you can say, "Do it again, and this time speak it to so-and-so across the room." You can turn the classroom into a rehearsal space where everyone shares in performance and is applauded for the effort. Recitation and performance are a way of planting the poem more firmly in memory and also a way of coming to understand it anew.
I firmly believe that oral performance is good training for written performance, and we're not talking about being an "actor." We're just talking about saying the poem like a person talking to other people, getting it across...

"It provides comfort, or food for thought, when you need it. Since nearly all of what I have by heart is metrical it's of a piece with the music I have by heart, a part of the ongoing rhythm of living."

If I go to hell, I shall not lack for great poetry! I might even get a pass into Heaven and sing in the choir.

Wilbur always made his students memorize Lycidas, and I think that's about 150 lines, the memorization made more difficult because it is heterometrical. He says: "The boys who complained loudest were those who had memorized the entire starting line-ups of every team in the National Football League." It is astonishing what teenagers can do in terms of memorization, and I reiterate, it is very much harder as you age. In my own case, the thousands of lines of Murphy I've memorized crowd out my Keats, my Yeats (Yes, I had Eve of St. Agnes memorized, who didn't?) I vehemently urge that students be "forced" to memorize, and flunk them if they don't. Let them exercise their vacant little brains. I've got a young rock star who is my friend and student, and I'll bet he has 30,000 lines of song lyrics in his pretty head. For those who missed it, Paul Stevens published this recollection of a performance by Aaron the Pooch, who studied with Mason, Sullivan and me:

Aaron Poochigian

“Today, professor, I have prepared the odes.”
Here is a youth who eyes the gods’ abodes
longingly, Helicon and Parnassus,
who studies Latin from the times of Crassus.
His adolescent pimples disappear,
his stutter too. Without a trace of fear
he belts out Kubla Khan and Dover Beach,
all the Romantic odes I’d planned to teach.
A thousand lines, I hear out every tale,
Odes to the West Wind and the Nightingale,
to Evening, Intimations, a Grecian urn.
He’s brought no book, only his heart to burn.
And there I stand thirty-five years ago
saying those lines to Warren in the snow.

Aaron did it in a week. Now he's thirty-five with a published book and two forthcoming to his credit. Memorize.

David and Tim, I respect your experience but I wonder if I have in mind a different type and level of student than the ones you're teaching and envisioning. The question at the top of the thread mentions students, but it doesn't specify what kind.

In an elective university-level course, chosen by students who know what they're getting into, the sort of student who is phobic about public speaking isn't likely to be in the class. The students who choose the course will probably get all the benefits both of you describe.

In a required introductory survey course at a high school or community college, I think there's a lot more room for the sort of bad experience that adults have occasionally told me about: a required recitation that left an enduring bad taste in the reluctant student's mouth. Perhaps it's rare, but the stories have stuck with me.

I guess I'm less worried about teaching new poets than I am about creating and developing an audience for poetry, and I guess that's why I'm affected by stories of the ways people have been alienated from poetry. It's good to hear that recitation-from-memory has positive results for the most part.

Lovely. Worth listening to again and again. Thanks for the link.