Word for Word: Feed your brain by memorising poems

The last time I committed a poem to memory was when, still in my teens, I fell in love with Seamus Heaney's Door into the Dark. Before that, at school, we were required to learn poems by heart. Often the real meaning eluded me, but when lines come back to me now, reinforced by subsequent reading and a life's experience, their value is greatly increased.

I asked a few young ones recently what poems they had learned at school, and they said they knew only "quotes" from poems – for use in exam questions, presumably. I was intrigued, therefore, when I came across a US blogger, Kate Haas, who conducted a fascinating experiment with her sons.

Searching for ways to keep them occupied during school holidays, and ruminating on how valuable her own learning of poetry at school had been, she hit on an idea. It involved a certain amount of bribery and corruption: how else could you get an 11-year-old boy to learn poems by heart?

It sounds like a disciplined household: the boys' time with television and video games was already limited each day. The deal their mother offered was that if they would learn a poem – usually a classic – by heart she would allow them extra time on Minefield. Haas writes with pride about the 11-year- old reciting with relish On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. What a way to train the butterfly brains of the tech generation.

I’m astonished by the speed and skill of young poetry slammers, although I believe content is sometimes sacrificed to form. But most of the material read at poetry slams uses contemporary language. One of the advantages of learning classic poetry by heart is exposure to vocabulary and grammar beyond the quotidian.

I’ve been very impressed by the Poetry Aloud competition run by Poetry Ireland and the National Library of Ireland, which rewards the recital of poetry in public by young people. But I’m interested too in the private sphere, where we learn a poem to keep it in our heads and dig it out at any moment, say it quietly, enjoy its imagery and its language, and then put it back.

My mother developed a habit of committing poetry to memory to keep her brain sharp. My ability to do this is shockingly limited. I’m optimistically assuming that lack of use, and not age, has caused this and am on a mission to derust it and start restocking the memory box.