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Times
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Reviving the lost art of learning and reciting poetry
J. Alfred Prufrock certainly makes for more pleasurable listening than the Shipping Forecast or the typical dire warnings about warm weather. Those tuned in to Radio 4 before 8am on Tuesday will have enjoyed Freddie Fox, scion of the acting dynasty, reciting TS Eliot in tremendous tones — the morning spread out against the sky. The occasion for this recital was a fine one. Monday marked this year's finals of Poetry by Heart, a national competition for reciting poetry. Pupils from across England descended on Shakespeare's Globe to recite their favourite stanzas. Some 200,000 children have taken part in the competition since it was founded in 2013, supported by Andrew Motion, the poet laureate at the time, to encourage the teaching of poetry. • The power of poetry for kids Reciting poetry is something of a lost art. The compulsory requirement for students to learn poems was scotched from the curriculum in 1944. Yet in 2012, it made a surprise return to the English syllabus. Some teachers complained it was an outdated practice, yet the success of the Poetry by Heart competition suggests they were wrong. Plus, according to a study by Cambridge University, there are benefits to reciting poetry. Its Poetry and Memory Project concluded that those who memorised poems found it provided a useful container for thoughts, a comfort zone for the brain that helped forge new emotional connections. And which poem did it find was most commonly known for recital? The Owl and the Pussy-Cat. Fox, a patron of Poetry by Heart, explained why knowing great poems is important. 'It's a compass, a road map when it's in your head to navigate the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune … a way of giving words to those problems when you don't quite perhaps have the words yourself.' The pupils who appeared at the Globe can thank the work of Poetry By Heart for reviving this lost life skill.
BBC News
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Study highlights poets' 'obsession' with lawnmowers
The university said the study revealed Britain's "poetic obsession" with the lawnmower, which has been used to explore themes such as childhood, violence and addiction. An early example was in 1651 when Andrew Marvell, a satirist and politician, wrote a poem where a scythe accidentally killed a bird as a comment on the English Civil Wars. Ms Gardner's study claims lawnmower poetry reached its highpoint in the last 50 years. In 1979, Philip Larkin described killing a hedgehog with a motorised lawnmower. And in 2007, Andrew Motion, who was poet laureate at the time, based an elegy for his father on memories of him mowing the lawn. Mark Waldron's 2017 poem I Wish I Loved Lawnmowers explored the narrator's addiction to crack cocaine. "British poets are very interested in the lawn as a nostalgic space, so lawnmowers are often associated with childhood memories, especially of fathers working," said Ms Gardner. "The lawn is a safe domestic, often suburban, space in which unexpected violence can occur, as when Larkin kills a hedgehog."
