Some argue that to properly appreciate a poem you should memorize it, and that if you haven't, well, you have not paid proper homage to the poet. Most popular poems roll off the tongue like song lyrics and perhaps for that reason best loved poems are easy to memorize. Favorite poems bear repetition. Memorize them and you can recite them at odd moments to amuse yourself. There may even be occasions when, instead of merely quoting a famous line from a poem, you'll want to offer the complete stanza or the whole poem for consideration.

Poets often labor mightily over a poem. If you like what they've done, commit it to memory. In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 he imagined book lovers committing entire books to memory. Doing the same for a few poems is effort well spent with interest to be accrued over a lifetime.

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External Links

  • Poets.org
  • From the Academy of American Poets.