You know.
Where they have all memorized a book to keep it alive.
learning poetry by heart
Long before I could read to myself, my younger sister and I were familiar with The Child’s Garden of Verses, Lewis Carroll’s “Hunting of the Snark” and Edward Lear’s Nonsense Songs and Verses. I suspect that I would now be diagnosed as dyslexic - I couldn’t read till I was past seven, so if I was to hang onto these favourite poems I had to know them by heart. [...]
Now, as I repeat those long-ago-learnt verses to myself at moments of anxiety or stress, sorrow or elation, or just to alleviate the plain ordinary boredom of traffic jams and bus queues, I am more than grateful to those who enabled me to acquire such a rich store, which will last me as long as my memory does.
And I remember too the account by Evgenia Ginsberg in her book Into the Whirlwind of how the poetry she had learnt as a child had enabled her to endure the terrible years in Stalin’s Gulag, and indeed, when in solitary confinement, had, she thought, actually saved her sanity. Most of us, please God, are unlikely to suffer such torment, but I still think it is a pity that getting children to learn by heart is now dismissed as “learning by rote”, and dropped from the curriculum. "
