Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem

by Catherine Robson

Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived.Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once
classroom Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today.Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, History

312 pages, Hardcover

First published September 4, 2012

Reviews

[Angelina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really great book. The introduction was very academic, but once you get into the book proper, Robson has some beautifully expressed ideas about what poems did in education and what poems do after a person learns them. I think my favorite idea is what a poem can do in times of trauma, like war.

[J. Boo]

From http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

"Robson compares classroom procedures in Britain and the United States during the years when recitation held a sizeable and official slot in the curriculum (roughly 1875 to 1950)..."

Casabianca/"The boy stood on the burning deck" is one of her case studies.