Why We Should Memorize | The New Yorker | January 2013
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.”