On memorizing poetry

Grade Level: Elementary

We don't have homework at Holden School but today students copied poems using calligraphy pens to take home and memorize for fun over the weekend.  

Later when I researched the pedagogical rationale for poetry memorization, I found some interesting and compelling support for such practices.  None of the articles I found had any strong brain-based evidence that memorization of poetry makes you more analytical or intelligent.  Instead the memorization of poetry seems to cultivate a love of language and rhythm, an internalization of words and stanzas that shapes our cognitive and sensory experiences of writing we encounter later in life.

-From The Cat in the Hat on up, verse teaches children something about the patterns and relationships that bind together the words of which it is composed. Poetry sets up an abstract system of order and harmony; the rhythm and the rhyme scheme are logical structures that a child can comprehend even before he understands the words themselves, just as he can grasp the rhythmic and harmonic relations of a piece of music...What the child discovers, in other words, is not only aesthetically pleasing, but important to cognitive development. Classic verse teaches children an enormous amount about order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation (tense), and contingent possibility (mood). Mastering these concepts involves the most fundamental kind of learning, for these are the basic categories of thought and the framework in which we organize sensory experience.-"In Defense of Memorization" by Michael Knox Beren

-The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”-"Why We Should Memorize" by Brad Leithauser

Also worth reading:
-Why I Force my Students to Memorize Poetry (Despite the fact it won't be on standardized tests) by Andy Waddell (The New Yorker)
-'Poems to Learn by Heart: The Merit of Memorizing Verse (NPR)