Just to second Dot's point: memorization is a key to understanding. It's
impossible to understand *the experience of* allusion, for example, unless
you have memorized Shakespeare as Milton has, or as Keats or Coleridge
has. But I'd go further and say that it's very hard to practise criticism
at all unless you let your mind tarry, tease, tickle, and try over
passages of verse and prose; it's often in the smallest hours, or in the
first moments of a morning, that I realize something important about a
line that has been shifting slyly around the corners of my memory; just as
it is invariably in the discussion of *something else* that I suddenly
*remember and recognize* the meaning, the effect of some phrase, period,
or passage. That is, as we all know, insight often takes place through a
process of collation or confection, to which the memorial assimilation of
the work of one or another writer is an indispensable first step. When a
student goes blank in the middle of a supervision, completely drops the
discussion at hand, and says, 'Oh, *that's why* that stanza in the third
canot of the fourth book of The Faerie Queene begins with [ .... ] and
ends with [ .... ]', then I know that that student has crossed the
threshold and is in the building. Without memorization it can't happen --
whether that memorization be the result of a concentrated effort to
assimilate and commit, or the accident of frequent reiteration and long
converse, it hardly matters.
And so I encourage all my students to memorize as much as they can, of
everything. If they go on to a career in academia, those passages will
remain little beating hearts in the circulation of their ideas; and if
they leave critical reading behind, those passages will remain like still
pools in the night, refreshing and reminding. And who knows: one day they
might want to welcome a child into the world with the first few lines of
the Inferno, and find that their dog-eared Dante has been chucked
(without ceremony) out of the hospital bag. It happens.
az
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