Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem by Catherine Robson (PDF)

Description

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. Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation’s progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca,” Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and Charles Wolfe’s “Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley’s “Invictus” and Rudyard Kipling’s “If–,” asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today. Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I read a review of the book in The Weekly Standard. I bought it as a gift for a relative, so I can’t comment on the actual book.

⭐Academic and Tedious. (Academic doesn’t normally bother me … but the topic was of zero importance). Unreadable.Couldn’t get q auarter way through this book.I almost never buy books … only did so because was not in any library. Now I know why. I thought the book might be about the benefits and methods of memorized poems (and which might be worthwhile). Not at all.

⭐Catherine Robson’s extraordinary book, a feat of imagining as well as of scholarship, explores the memorization and reciting of poems in classrooms across England and America through substantial portions of the last two centuries. Memorization began to decline in the decades after (roughly) 1920, America holding out a bit longer than Britain, as the backlash against rote learning in both countries combined with other factors to spell the end of the practice. Robson compares herself in the introduction to a historical novelist, and her treatment of the subject throughout is lovingly and tellingly inflected with personal and familial experience. She notes that many would be willing, perhaps in a sentimental mood, to regret the loss of a world in which many individuals could recite fine-sounding lines; but she’s under no illusion that bringing back that world is in the least way possible, whether or not desirable.Reviewed By WILLIAM H. PRITCHARDmore at:from:

Keywords

Free Download Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem in PDF format
Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem PDF Free Download
Download Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem 2012 PDF Free
Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem 2012 PDF Free Download
Download Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem PDF
Free Download Ebook Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem