‘Learning by Heart’ by Richard Gill, 34.3 (1983)
Reasons for learning poetry by heart, Gill says, include memorability (that some lines stick, unbidden, in our minds, and therefore learning poems by heart responds to something deep in the nature of the poem itself), privilege and possession (that learning a poem by heart is a way of celebrating a poem we like, and a way to hold within ourselves a great work), and an ‘unexpected benefit’:
When I think about the poems I have learned I often find that they exist in my mind more as themselves than as something about which I can be clever.
