Whats Veeky Forumss stance on memorizing poetry?

Whats Veeky Forumss stance on memorizing poetry?
How many poems can you recite? Did you ever attempt to memorize a long/epic poem?

absolutely pointless

the only people who would be "impressed" by this are the kinds of people you do not want to associate with

In any normal circumstance, virtually any poem is only a google search away.

>Whats Veeky Forumss stance on memorizing poetry?

Acceptable only if the poem memorized is one you wrote.

>committing beautiful things to your memory is pointless

if you go to prison ever, it would be good to have them memorized. It would be like reading them in your memories

I memorize them because I read them often, I don't read them to memorize though.

I think its great, reading them out loud by memory, by myself, adds a beauty and vigour to the poem I could never get from reading it off a paper

i can recite 3 poems, one from ezra pound, one from a greek i can't remember the name (maybe its pindar, not sure) and one from an english poet i don't remember the name

I did this when I was younger, primarily as I thought it would impress the ladies.

Anyway, one night I managed to get my autistic self to a nightclub, and after spending a few hours walking around the dancefloor without interacting with any women, I became sufficiently drunk enough to muster up the courage to speak to a far more inebriated girl who was half sprawled out across the bar stalls.

"Hi, can I just tell you something?" I asked, the alcohol having numbed my anxiety.

I proceeded to recite a W.B Yeats poem.

>"I KNOW that I shall meet my fate"
>"Somewhere among the clouds above"

"Whuut?" was her slurred reaction.

>"Those that I fight I do not hate"
>"Those that I guard I do not love"
>"My country is Kiltartan Cross-"

"Oh FUCK OFF you weirdo" was her justified response.

I've never been more humiliated in my fucking life. I thought I was being an aloof dandy, reciting a poem I had committed to memory, which had absolutely no relation to the situation I was in at that moment. I thought she would find it quirky but she was right, I was being fucking weird. The alcohol had removed my social anxiety and I sperged.

Sometimes this random moment creeps up in my memory and makes me physically jolt from the sheer excruciating embarrassment.

I can recite the first 14 or so lines from Sor Juana's Primero sueño, almost all pf Kubla Kahn, almost all the first stanza of Tintern Abbey, and 4 or 5 of Shakespeare's monologues, although not perfectly. Also some lines I really liked from many different poets and poems.