I was exposed to many new practices during my first year at Cambridge, including but not limited to, the consumption of ice cream in winter, the feeding of closely shaved alpacas (don’t ask), and of course, that particular layer of hell involving nocturnal essay writing. The English Faculty extended a full platter of distinctly Cambridge habits: close-reading, Empsonian eccentricity, and a vague disdain for popular literature, all of which I enthusiastically assimilated into my own intellectual habits. There was one thing, however, which I noticed was missing: the culture of learning by heart.

To be fair, I come from the fairly conservative recesses of rural Switzerland where notions of ‘critical thinking’ and ‘source evaluation’ have yet to penetrate the masses. As a result, my early education has been an amalgam of dictées, German psalms, and not-as-fun-as-it-sounds biochemistry. This was a system which rewarded painstaking, mental labour, primarily in the form of the ingestion and regurgitation of facts. It strikes me as ironic that I should now end up studying a subject as creative as English – but this was the reality of education, and still is, for many. Year after year, I graduated with flying colours simply because I was really, really good at memorising.

“Who cares if I can recite long passages of In Memoriam to an invisible public?”

Then I arrived here. Amidst all the exotic feedback I have received on essays (extended metaphors involving everything from race cars to stir-fry), never once have I been told to learn a passage verbatim, or memorise authors’ birth/death dates. The skill which had taken me years to perfect was rendered obsolete: who cares if I can recite long passages of In Memoriam to an invisible public? What matters, and understandably so, is my ability to think, articulate, write.

The Faculty of Education recently published an article on the benefits of committing poetry to memory. The survey, conducted by The Poetry and Memory Project, suggested that, “once a poem is inside you, it can feel as if you are on the inside of the poem.” This type of thing has been said before. I am immediately reminded, for one, of Ted Hughes’ book, By Heart: 101 Poems and How to Remember Them. So is it true? Could rote learning open up new interpretive spaces for us to explore?

The answer is: if you do it right. There have been serious arguments made about why it might fail: that it inhibits things like logical discovery and problem solving. I can vouch for the near-mindlessness of trying to retain information for an exam, all forgotten as almost swiftly as it is learnt. But I think the Memory Project, and Hughes, are onto something. In fact, writing this, I recall the applicant page on my college’s website: “We are not looking for a fully developed technical vocabulary, a capacity to reproduce theoretical jargon or the ability to recite Homer from memory.” But the question is, what if we were all walking around with The Iliad in our heads?

“I am not telling you to renounce Google forever”

This is all to say that there might be some merit in the traditionalist approach to learning after all. Besides creating the neural pathways indispensable to long-term memory, memorization is the first step in fashioning the repertoire of information we rely on every day to evaluate the world, and the text, around us. If we didn’t actually know anything, how could we ‘think critically’ about it? Interestingly, discussions of memorisation online quickly lead to discussions of scripture – about how to best learn and understand it. Indeed, there is something distinctly classical about this sort of education. To be clear, I am not telling you to renounce Google forever. Rather, for all the Englings out there, have a think about the role memory plays in your appreciation of literature. Which are the poems you remember? Which do you wish you could carry around with you everywhere? I know, on my part, that the Fables de la Fontaine, as didactic as they are, have stuck with me since those (admittedly traumatic) preschool years, acting as a strange, rustling subconscious layer to my present existence. Alice in Wonderland is another. Heck, even the back of those chocolate cereal boxes. It may sound absurd, but that’s how memory works.

I know. The next deadline is impending. Cambridge students don’t have time for the niceties of oration. But I am speaking about those few, precious moments during term when the craze of university seems to come to a halt. In those moments, if you come across a poem or extract you can’t let go, learn it by heart. You may just be surprised by what you find in return.