Customer Reviews

By Heart (Faber poetry)

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It's clear that the editor, Ted Hughes, gave this selection a good deal of thought. The selection was a search to find poems of suitable length for and worthy of memorization. So the term "by heart" functions both in the sense of knowing by memory and feeling something deeply. Anyway, you will find many poems you will want to know by heart: "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone", "There's a certain Slant of light", "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun" for example, excellent works. Lots of Shakespeare and Yeats, Blake and Dickinson. He has also included Hamlet's "To be..." and Macbeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow..."

Now that the internet has replaced individual mental retention, I suppose this book seems anachronistic, which is too bad. The great English poems are among the few mental constructs will have seemed worth preserving in the future. Furthermore, the capability to remember something exactly is a real gift. Memorization is a mental capacity that is being lost, so too the ability to contemplate. The slowing down to contemplate a subject, which poetry invites us to do, is important if there is ever to be an American civilization. Life without it is quite stupid, not to say exhausting.

Having done this for a while, i.e. memorize poems I love, I can testify to the worthiness of it, not for recitation purposes (no one wants to listen), but because it's a way to knowing the work and the poet more intimately and because it becomes part of you. You finally have something good up there.

It's probably good for the brain as well: poor, distracted thing.

Hughes provides hints on memorization in the introduction, which is somewhat useful, but you have to find your own method, make your own memory palace. The selection of poems is excellent.