Thank you

…for joining us in the very first Poetry By Heart competition, which I hope you’ll think, as we do, is a momentous thing in its way: a pioneering national competition designed to encourage pupils at school and college in England to learn and to recite poems by heart.  Not in an arm-waving, props-supported thespian extravaganza, but as the outward and audible manifestation of an inwardly-understood and enjoyed poem.

Photograph by Johnny Rigg

Emotional noise

Ever since I first started reading poetry in earnest, more than forty years ago, I’ve always thought its meaning has as much to do with sound as it does to do with sense.  Poetry, crucially, is an acoustic form.  It’s emotional noise.  That is why it’s often able to move us before we completely understand it.  Its sounds allow us to receive it in our hearts, as well as in our heads.

A gateway

It has always been my hope in setting up Poetry by Heart that we would give young people the opportunity to enjoy a wider range of poetry than they usually find in their preparation for exams.  We want to offer new ways of finding pleasure and confidence in a part of the curriculum where such things can be in short supply. The sort of pleasure and confidence, in fact, that adds tremendously to young people’s self-esteem, to their verbal skills, to their powers of communication, and so to a more fulfilled life and greater opportunities.  The competition is an end in itself, but it’s also a gateway, a beginning.

Deep recurring truths

Poetry By Heart is designed to put the emphasis on learning by heart, not on learning by rote.  It is about understanding and remembering the deep recurring truths about our experience as humans, in terms that are especially beautiful and resonant.  It is about doing this in a pleasure-filled way.  And it is part of the same benevolent revolution in poetry-proving and poetry-teaching that formed a part of the original intention in founding the Poetry Archive  during my ten years as Poet Laureate.

Nourishing words

Most of us have some recollection of being made to learn things when we were kids ourselves, and most of us can remember bits or all of those poems in our older age.  This tells us several things, I think.  It tells us how important it is to learn good stuff, so that our heads are full of nourishing words and not full of junk.  It tells us this good stuff changes its meanings in very interesting ways as the years pass and the words stay in our memories. It tells us that despite or because of the effort involved in learning by heart, we as humans have a primitive appetite for it.  It makes us feel good.  It makes us find ourselves.

An excitement and a dare

When Samuel Johnson was ruminating about the value of literature, he said it helped him ‘enjoy and endure’ his existence.  Those two words form the foundation of our competition.  We want it to be fun, as it encourages pupils to discover new pleasures and fulfilments, but we want it to be serious as well: an excitement and a dare. To demonstrate, in fact, the marvellous form of two-way travelling that poetry allows us: into ourselves, and out into the world, at one and the same time.

Andrew Motion