![]() | Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem Subjects: Poetry -- Social aspects; Recitation (Education); Poetry -- Study and teaching; Hemans Mrs. 1793–1835. Casabianca; Gray Thomas 1716–1771. Elegy written in a country churchyard; Wolfe Charles 1791–1823. Burial of Sir John Moore; Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived. Catherine Robson is is professor of English at New York University. She is the author of Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (Princeton). |
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