Is poetry dead? The government doesn’t think so: state schools are compiling lists of poems that they think all children should know by heart, after Ofsted launched an investigation into the cultural knowledge children take with them when leaving school.

This is a subject close to my heart. For years, I’ve promoted poetry through anthologies of verse, apps, live events, and articles. Part of the logic behind the recent decision is that learning the same poems means we always have something in common, no matter what our backgrounds. This is an idea that cuts across political lines.

But just what is the point of poetry, anyway, and why should we be memorising poems in school?

Reading out loud lets you lose yourself

We talk a lot about ‘mindfulness’ these days. Well, reading a poem, and giving yourself over to the movements of rhythm and meter, is an excellent way to bring about peace of mind. But better still is reciting a poem. Forming each phrase for yourself, and focusing on the lines that follow, there is little room for unbidden thoughts, and you truly lose yourself in the words.

This kind of experience might be more valuable now than ever. It’s no coincidence that mindfulness has risen in parallel with digital technologies. I’m no technophobe — indeed, I set up ‘iF Poems’ and ‘The Love Book’, two apps for fans of poetry — but we are clearly realising as a culture that it is important to take our eyes off our screens from time to time. As Helena Bonham Carter wittily observed, whilst recommending that families read poetry together, when E.M. Forster told us to ‘only connect’, he was not urging us to use computers.

How to learn a poem by heart

Learn a poem like you learn the words to a pop song: read it aloud, hear and feel the rhythm, and let the sound of the poem help you shape it in your mind.

Look for key words in the poem that describe people, animals, objects, and hold their images in your mind. Mentally work your way along them like a chain and you will remember the structure of the poem.

Follow Anthony Hopkins’ tip for leaning a script: just read it 100 times and then you know it.

Learn to understand poems before you memorise them. Having a sense of what a poem means gives you a canvas upon which to paint the words in your memory.

Poetry is an essential part of a rounded education. Reading it aloud promotes confidence, and working to understand it encourages us to be sensitive to the complexities of ideas — and not to look for overly simplistic solutions. In 2013, Seamus Heaney went on record to urge schools to get kids into poems, to learn the ‘cultural ear’ of poetry”. In my anthology A Poem for Every Night of the Year I aimed to make a ritual of the reading of poetry.

A study by University of Cambridge into memorising poetry found that most participants described the learning of a poem by heart as an ‘enriching, life-enhancing experience’. In times of need, the poems we learn are always ours to fall back on.

Poems help us feel less alone — teenagers discover in great verse that they are not the only ones who have felt hardship or pain. And there is evidence, too, that learning poetry keeps our minds sharp. Alzheimer’s patients often respond well to poems and pieces of music they learnt when young. They’re with us for life.

Poems to learn

Hope is the thing with feathers – Emily Dickinson 

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Invictus – W E Henley 

(Read by Nelson Mandela during his 27 years in prison)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

More recommendations 

We Real Cool — Gwendolyn Brooks (for teenagers, especially)

Still I Rise — Maya Angelou (one of the best human rights poems)

Love Poem — Pablo Neruda

Allie Esiri’s poetry anthology, A Poem For Every Night of the Year, is out now and published by Macmillan Children’s Books www.iLiterature.net