Memorizing poetry

Abstract

Abstract Before the mid-twentieth century, pedagogy in many countries involved a considerable amount of memorization, perhaps especially in engagements with literature. But after World War II, the practice of memorization and public recitation virtually disappeared in American schools, generally replaced by a practice of analysis in which the poem is experienced principally as an object of interpretation. Here, Jonathan Culler describes the undergraduate course ‘Major Poets’, taught by him for many years at Cornell University. For each of the poets studied (including Shakespeare, Pope, Keats, and Dickinson), the students were asked to complete a variety of exercises, one of which was to memorize and recite a poem of at least 12 lines. In doing so, the highly patterned language of the poem was presented not as something to be interpreted, but as a discourse to be repeated, performed, and appreciated in other ways.