Memorizing Poetry

As promised, Serious Business.

In order to improve my memory, impress chicks, and maybe even learn something, I’ve begun memorizing poetry. During the summer, I committed the entirety of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” to memory, in addition to several other poems over the past seven months or so. Namely, Edgar Allen Poe’s “El Dorado,” Stephen Crane’s “In the Desert,” Ezra Pound’s “A Pact” and “In a Station of the Metro,” and Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice.” Right now I’m working on Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

The process is surprisingly easy. Just going a couple lines at a time, memorizing even a longer poem like “The Hollow Men” isn’t too difficult, so long as one is willing to invest some time in the process and repeats the learned material with some regularity. Shorter poems, especially highly metrical ones like “El Dorado,” take very little effort at all.

To what end this endeavour? On a practical level, it’s a workout for one’s memory, and helps me remember portions of works that I have not even tried to commit to memory. Having a ready body of works memorized also allows one to take advantage of any opportunities for a (perhaps overly) clever reference in the course of conversation.

Of course, spending so much time with a poem also aids understanding. I feel that I understand “The Hollow Men” better now than I did when I first began memorizing it, simply because I have dealt with it so much. The structure of these poems also becomes much clearer.

In short, it’s an engaging, beneficial exercise, and a big hit at parties

Nerdy parties, anyway.