Category: Exchanges

Why bother to learn poetry? Now that you can summon any of a thousand poems to your phone screen in seconds, what’s the point of having a sonnet in your head?

I think this is a question worth asking. Especially now that reciting poems has been invited back onto the English National Curriculum after a sixty-year exile. And if press coverage is anything to go by, it’s likely to meet with conflicting responses. On the one hand, despite (or because of?) the increasing availability of poems “on tap”, there’s a palpable sense of nostalgia for a time when people could readily summon lines of verse, supplying poetic insight for all occasions and reinforcing a sense of shared cultural heritage. On the other, the notion arouses anxieties about the superficiality of rote learning and the ordeal of enforced recitation – as expressed by indignant newspaper columnists, making heavy use of the word parrot. This ambivalence was reflected in our recent study of poetry teaching.ⁱ Whilst some teachers thought that memorisation was “old fashioned” if not a threat to enjoyment, the very few who incorporated it into their practice said that students appeared to value it. Moreover, for the teachers who had learned poetry themselves when young, it was evidently a cherished resource for teaching and for life. We might surmise that this ambivalence represents the difference between learning “by rote” and “by heart” – but it’s just not that straightforward. Poems learned in a mechanistic way sometimes endure in the memory, perhaps eventually to unfold their meaning; conversely, lines heavy with personal significance may enter the memory effortlessly, only to disappear as easily.

It’s also a question worth asking because it’s not only education ministers who are interested. Just this week, three people told me that they’ve taken up learning poetry: to ward off dementia; for spiritual nourishment; and, for one Eeyorish soul, in case of being taken hostage and chained to a radiator. Are they right to bother? (Probability of being taken hostage aside.) Drawing on evidence from our study, on the literature of poetry and memory, and on my recent experience of trying to lay down some poetry tracks in my own head, I offer this list of possible reasons why they might be. So then, a poem in the memory:

connects us with the poem’s primary mode of sound

A poem learned is a poem literally in-corporated. Taking it into our body enables us to feel its rhythms and cadences from within, experiencing it poetically and subjectively rather than as object and artefact.

makes it available to our conscious and subconscious processes

Renaissance scholars would transcribe excerpts from their reading into a commonplace book, whose contents would be rehearsed and committed to memory. As these scholars knew, when texts are internalised they become available to the processes of the mind, facilitating connections which lead to understanding, intellectual development and, ultimately, invention. And those connections can happen in both directions: the poem in the head may enrich our understanding of the world – which may in turn entice meaning out of a poem.

affords a different kind of knowledge

Knowing a poem is a personal, experiential kind of knowledge.ⁱⁱ And, fanciful though it may sound, knowing a poem is somewhat like knowing another person. As neuroscientist Iain McGilchristⁱⁱⁱ argues, our encounters with works of art happen through the same neural networks as those through which we encounter living things. Perhaps we fully inhabit a poem only when we allow it to inhabit and in-form us.

offers a different sort of familiarity

Familiarity can breed – if not contempt – then at least boredom and indifference. Music, paintings and poems may become so familiar that we no longer appreciate their qualities. But equally, sometimes, works of art seem to pass through the slough of familiarity to emerge revitalised, as if encountered for the first time. My own experience, like that of another adult-poetry-learner-blogger, is that “memorising revives things that have become stale or deadened”.^iv

is a form of imitation

If imitation has acquired a similarly pejorative flavour, it is surely an effect of postmodern western culture, which prizes originality and self-expression. But imitation used to be a highly regarded path to knowledge and mastery in all the arts (and still is in Eastern culture). One reason, perhaps, why poets have always memorised the work of other poets. And even if the memory of the lines eventually decays, their rhythms and cadences and images may well be embedded in the deep strata of our minds, exerting pressure on the upper contours of consciousness.

confers a sense of ownership

“Remembering the words is kind of owning the words,” said one of our poetry-project teachers. In purely psychological terms, our investment of time and mental effort would be likely to produce feelings of ownership. Equally, whereas the poem on the page is physically held at arm’s length, the memorised poem is held within the body, running along our neural pathways, enabling us in a real sense to speak our mind, so that the poem is indeed imagination “bodied forth”.^v

 

All these suggestions are based on personal observations connected with research evidence from other fields; for despite signs of reviving interest in poetry memorisation, and its probable reinstatement on the curriculum, there is currently very little research on the subject or on how it might best be embedded within pedagogy. Questions about exactly what we are trying to recover remain conspicuously unexamined. Moreover, as my opening query implied, these questions can also be located within the wider context of the enormous changes being wrought by technology to the ways in which we perceive and interact with the world, including the “outsourcing” of human memory to digital devices – all the issues to do with the short-circuiting of learning and the shallowness of cognitive processing to which Nicholas Carr^vi has alerted us.

So we’re really pleased and excited that we now have funding for a major interdisciplinary research project^vii to investigate the relationship between poetry and memory. Through a combination of literary and documentary research and social science methods, we will investigate the interaction between the memorised poem and the individual; and the social and cultural uses of learned poetry. We’ll be looking at how memorisation and recitation change understanding and emotional engagement, how a memorised poem alters its meaning for an individual over time, and the ways in which memorisation may be affected by changing technologies. Ultimately, we hope the insights we gain will enable us to see the ways in which this important mode of understanding may be best cultivated.

If you bury money in your garden, you won’t get any interest on it, nor help build any new homes or companies.  You might think the risk of losing money is lower in the garden than in a bank, but someone or something else might dig it up, or it might stop being a valid form of currency, or you might lose track of where it is, or die without giving it to someone else. Memory is similar – we save it for a purpose, a purpose that changes it.   As children we develop our ability to plan at roughly the same time we develop our ability to remember.  We use the same parts of our brain to remember as to imagine or plan. Just as the purpose of money is transferring wealth, the purpose of memory is action.

The most basic problem an animal has is what to do now, what to do next. Since the world at any instant does not provide us with enough information to make the best decision about what to do next, we need an active memory.  Even simple animals and plants have a kind of memory, although some species use their own memory less than others.  Trout can find food, mating partners, and fresher water by smell.  So a fish brain takes in smell, translates it into goals, then pushes that information into movements of its spine: memory is barely required.   Birds have small brains but travel fast, and can direct more information from memory into the goal-choosing forebrain than fish can. So they spread out through their environment and figure out which trees are fruiting right now, leaving fruit yet to ripen until later.

Primates also work in niches where the immediate environment offers few clues about where the next meal is coming from, and so they have more in common with birds than fish in this respect. Humans evolved from fish and our brains are shaped that way too – our goals are selected by our forebrain which is right up near the olfactory lobe and the nose. However, if you look at a human brain, information from ears, touch and eyes have to go via the locations used to associate information with memory before they come back forward to the planning.  The olfactory lobe is still in its evolved location, but humans have worse sense of smell than most other species and other abilities like memory play more of a part in our actions.  We call species that integrate memory into plans to choose their behaviour cognitive. They can work on hard problems like how they can successfully collaborate to survive because they’ve co-evolved bigger brains with their adaptive behavioural strategies.

When we humans are born, we cannot perceive or understand most of what happens around us.  In fact, even as adults the complete complexity of the world is well beyond our perception. But by adulthood we have learned an amazing range of things that makes us the most cognitive of all species.  Not only do we learn from our own experience, but we learn from the experience of others.  This is also true of other animals, such as just chimpanzees, and we’re coming to realise, in fact, that many species mine information from the memories of others.  But humans do more than this.  Humans also share stories – we can learn about actions we haven’t observed, even synthesised summaries of actions and situations that never took place.  This is what makes our cognition exceptional.

The advantages of memory might make you think that holding onto it would be the best plan.  But the fact is, if memory is for acting, then there is no reason to remember things that no longer affect our behaviour. In fact, it’s worse than “no reason”. There is a computational and therefore cognitive cost to remembering too many things.  It takes time to search through memory, and we don’t want to accidentally apply a principle that no longer holds.  Forgetting is our brain’s method of automatically losing access to that which no longer applies.  However, generally speaking cognitive animals live longer than non-cognitive ones, perhaps because our memory is such a resource, not only to ourselves but to our children. Because we are a part of a social and a cognitive genus that has lasted for millions of years, it may be that we have evolved patterns of varied strategies.  Our genes may be able to rely on the fact that some family members will have long memories to help us if an old problem comes back, while others will always be ready to try new things.

Of course, stories are more than just memory about useful ways to operate in the world.  Stories are also a form of art, and as such, they contribute to our identity.  Group-level identity allows us to achieve both great and terrible things, but overall the effect of our incredible capacities has been our ability to vastly increase our numbers and to dominate almost every ecology on the planet.  Before the evolution of contemporary levels of art, language, writing and agriculture there were more macaques on the planet than humans.

The evolution of cooperation is not a mystery (as it is sometimes portrayed in the press), but it is one of the most exciting and challenging areas of research with more understanding emerging every day.  My group is one of many working to understand where our society comes from and how it works.  If you would like to read more academic papers about the evolution of human society and language, I have a list.