In Praise of Memorizing Poetry

It's refreshing to see someone stress the importance of memorizing poetry these days, as Brad Leithauser recently did in The New Yorker. He recounts the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who made his students memorize roughly 1,000 lines of poetry in a semester (much to their dismay). In that vein, Leithauser describes the push-back he gets from his own students when he makes them memorize a single sonnet by Shakespeare.So why even bother memorizing poetry these days? Here's Leithauser's ba … [Read more...]