This last insight doesn’t surprise me in the least. For nine years, I wrote a poetry column in a free newspaper in New York in which I stressed the need to remember the words. I was inundated with messages from professors to housewives, high-school students to businessmen. An email from “Scholar Spartan” is saved on my desktop. He wrote, “I was on the subway when I came across your piece. Thank you for explaining the nuances of Shelley’s narrative poem Alastor. It furthered my understanding—and interest—in the poem to the point where I quietly recited the last part (‘He lingered, poring on memorials . . .’) the rest of the ride home until I knew it by rote; because, really, by that time I knew how the narrator felt when ‘meaning on his vacant mind / Flashed like strong inspiration.’” Such inspiration can only occur when the poem stops being an object and starts being us.

Whitley quotes Derek Walcott: “When you read a poem on a platform, you are asking an audience to make an effort of memory, no matter how difficult the poem is. I think this has been lost in Western poetry: memory is not part of it any more, and if that is denied, you’re not going to get any real poetry . . . The function of poetry is to recite.”

In Robson’s book, I was fascinated to discover a disreputable canon of popular verse snubbed by the major anthologies, with works including Felicia Hemans’s “The Child’s First Grief”, Southey’s “After Blenheim”, Scott’s “Death of Marmion”, Longfellow’s “King Robert of Sicily”, and Whittier’s “Snowblind”. You can see why they have fallen out of fashion. Many feature battles. They promote virtues of bravery, heroism and sacrifice. They tend to be ballads and they invariably rhyme. Yet even at their worst (and some like Lowell’s Vision of Sir Launfal are bloody awful), they’re far more fun to say aloud than the great slabs of tasteful tedium in the TLS. Something indeed has been lost. Do today’s poets have the noisy, vulgar, mawkish, commanding gifts of rhetoric to capture an audience?

Whitley reflects, “If you accept even a part of Walcott’s assertion, then a case has to be made for bringing the memorisation of poems back in from the shadows, seeing it as a central element in revitalising our relationship with poetry in modern, Western culture. That may seem very grandiose, but it’s close to what I’ve come to believe.”

It’s what I believe too. For me, “forensic engagement” restricts the poem to the exam hall, where it will soon be forgotten. It is memory that takes the poem outside and into the world. The poem then exists in the street, on the bus, in the pause between stations. I don’t want poetry to be a political battleground. I just want people, of any age, to remember the stuff, for no better reason than it’s wonderful. Because it expresses the essence of what it means to be human—and life would be empty without it. If the poem is never known by heart, it stays on the page, little more than a crossword puzzle, a plaything of clever cleverness and never personally meaningful. It can never spontaneously arise at the right moment to provide comfort, solace, wisdom. It can never provide joy. Rachel Kelly’s memoir Black Rainbow: How Words Healed Me—My Journey Through Depression (Yellow Kite, £16.99) shows how poetry lifted her out of suicidal depression. That’s not some flip academic game. That’s life at its most raw, when the soul cries out for what is true.

Remember Mnemosyne. She is the mother of literature, science and the arts. She is the mother of all knowledge in the endless dance between the past and the future. To defend memory is not only to defend the essence of ourselves but the essence of civilisation.