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Rote Memorization is Good, Actually

When you were in school, did you ever have to recite a poem ‘by heart’ in front of your English class? If you’re younger than 30 I suspect that you never had that experience. I certainly did, and looking back, I’m more and more grateful for it.

Based on my – admittedly brief – research, the practice of having students recite poetry by memory has all but faded out, especially over the past few decades. I was able to find a few exceptions and some evidence of a resurgence (see this article), but it really does seem like it has nearly died out as a pedagogical practice. What a shame.

It’s easy to latch onto poetry recitation and its absence from modern curiculums probably because it’s inherently emotional and often nostalgic. That’s what poetry does, right? It evokes feelings. But I actually think this is the canary in the coal mine for a deeper problem. As a society, we really don’t exercise our innate memorization abilities nearly enough. Our working memories, much like our attention spans, have atrophied from disuse and neglect. This is part of a larger cultural shift that has become extremely pronounced over the past decade. As we outsource more and more of our cognitive tasks and, increasingly, executive reasoning, to technologies like smarthphones and Large Language Models, we need to be cognizant of what we’re losing and how we can compensate. Our ancestors were able to recite entire epics by rote; we struggle to even remember the phone numbers of our closest friends and family.

The late great literary critic Harold Bloom said of the importance of memory:

Memory is the major element in cognition in everything that we call the humanities. If you cannot remember, then you can’t think. And you can’t imagine. And you can’t write. And you can hardly read. -- Harold Bloom

It is to Professor Bloom that we must also turn for our way out of this mess. In an interview at the turn of the century, he said:

I think that we lost a great deal in education in this country (USA) and in other countries, when we stopped teaching people to memorize. Obviously, just repeating something by rote without understanding does no good whatsoever… but to possess something by memory, to really read a poem hundreds of times, because it can sustain hundreds of readings…. I think that if you possess a poem then it begins to possess you… it alters you, I think. It changes you.

I still remember the poem I recited in 8th grade English class, so embedded is it in my long-term memory. I was lucky to be able to choose; my siblings were assigned poems much longer than mine. I’ll recite it now with my eyes closed just in case you don’t believe me.

Side Note: It helps if you do it with a bad accent.

[Recite The Fall of Gil-galad, by JRR Tolkien]

Despite having that experience in grade school, though, I sadly did not carry the practice with me into adulthood, as I suspect is the case with many of you – if you even had the experience at all. It was only recently, after having read Harold Bloom’s book “How to Read and Why” that I started intentionally memorizing poems. And I’m not gonna lie, once I started, it was hard to stop. It’s kind of like Pokemon in a way. Once you start, you gotta catch ‘em all.

There are two poems in particular that Bloom recommends to start with. Both are short, with cadencecs that make them easy to ‘possess’.

[Recite The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson]

The second is a snatch of song by A.E. Housman, “A Shropshire Lad, XL”. It’s quite beautiful, really. I’d recommend it as a first poem to memorize if you’re too bothered to search for one – but I’ll spare you the recital since I’ve already tortured you enough!

You might be wondering how you can put all of this into practice. I think the best way is to first write out the poem by hand on flashcards, with one stanza per card. Spoiler alert: Writing things by hand is still one of the best ways to commit them to memory.

Once you have the poem written out, start with the first card and try to recite it from memory. If you make a mistake, look at the flashcard and read it aloud. Then, try again. If you get it right, move on to the next card and repeat the process. Each time you mess up, take it from the top. Do this for about 10-15 minutes per day for a few days, and the poem will be wedged firmly in your longterm memory. To keep it there, just recite it outloud every once in awhile.

Take this as a fair warning, though. Once you start possessing poems, you won’t want to stop. You’re liable to severely annoy your spouse or cohabitants. You’ve been warned.