Some poetry of this kind is written today, but not much—although Maya Angelou’s lines “You may trod me ... Get them to memorize some poems and declaim them, then talk about what they mean.

He instructed each student to memorize ... poems on it. In general, that choice makes no difference at all. For hours, I read nothing else as we coursed across the country. Sometimes I spoke its ...

But in early boyhood I did a fair amount of it. My mother, who had literary ambitions, paid me a penny a line to memorize poems. The first one I mastered was Tennyson’s “The Eagle” (“He ...