How do the participants remember all those words? He says, “We talk about poetry by heart, not rote learning, and there is a difference. Rote learning sounds dry, deliberate and dusty. The children use a range of ways: repetition; recording their voice and hearing it back. They also use the memory temple.” The method of loci effortlessly links Ancient Greece with the modern classroom.  

Memory and understanding work together as a process. “First of all you choose the poem. Then you begin to think about it. You learn and memorise it—and finally you share it with others. Young people somehow suspect poetry is subject to a code and they want to know the code. They say ‘just tell me what it means.’ We don’t do that. We encourage a confident, enjoyable, individual response to poetry and we introduce them to all the great stuff out there.” This covers Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth as well as neglected works from Anne Finch, Mary Leapor and Hannah More. The winner this year was Emily Dunstan, 16, from Tooting, south London, as judged by a panel including poets Jo Shapcott, Daljit Nagra and Patience Agbabi. Dunstan recited “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop, “The Death Bed” by Siegfried Sassoon and “Ode to a Nightingale” by Keats. That’s an extraordinary accomplishment.

The Faculty of Education next door is home to a remarkable Poetry and Memory research project that began in January 2014 and promises to supply a dose of scientific rigour to any sentimentality around “the good old days”. This grew out of a project in which Professor David Whitley and fellow researcher Debbie Pullinger interviewed poetry teachers from primary school through to university level. He says, “Many of the most passionately committed teachers thought that it was essential for them to feel that they had ownership of the poems they were teaching, in some way, and felt deeply concerned that they should find ways whereby their students could also feel they took ownership of the poems.”

Whitley continues, “The more profound importance of this topic resides in the question of whether it may actually be central to what poetry is and does, how it really ‘lives’ inside us. Is memorisation, on this broader view, really a mode of relationship between individuals, cultures and poetry that modern cultures and pedagogies—with their increasing emphasis, as children get older, on the detailed analysis of words on the page—tend to side-line or ignore completely?”
The project has gathered material from an online survey completed by over 400 respondents. This asked people what poetry meant to them, what value they saw in it, when they memorised poems and in what circumstances. The next phase will explore the most significant issues that emerge from the survey through in-depth interviews with individuals.

“I’ve been impressed—and actually very moved—by some of the accounts I’ve read so far from respondents about what a particular memorised poem means for them. Many of our respondents seemed to feel that a memorised poem was a significant expansion of their being.

“Two other things strike me as being very interesting. First nearly 90 per cent of people said they’d first memorised poetry as children and a similar proportion said that they learned poems as an adult (80 per cent). It would seem that very few people have learned poems as adults who hadn’t first done so as children. If the practice is valuable, then, it would seem vital that we begin early. Secondly, people had learned poems for many reasons but ‘pleasure’ was the most often cited.”