RECITING HOMER BY HEART

~ Posted by Emma Hogan, February 9th 2012

With a mayoral election in May and the 2012 Olympics in July and August, you might think the Mayor of London would have enough on his mind. But Boris Johnson claims in this week’s New Statesman that he’s set himself a new project. He's learning "The Iliad" off by heart. “I am only on line one hundred,” he says, “and it’s so laborious.” Book One has 600 lines, and there are 24 books, so Johnson has some way to go.

Last night at the Southbank centre, Alice Oswald, the poet who withdrew from the T.S. Eliot prize because of her unease over its sponsors, recited her latest work by heart. “Memorial” is an adaptation of "The Iliad", which sets out to capture the atmosphere of the original, not the story. Its 84 pages took an hour and a half to recite. Oswald stood in the spotlight, never hesitated, and never took a sip of water. There were dramatic pauses, but her mellifluous voice kept the recital understated. Afterwards Oswald said she had learnt the poem by speaking it aloud when she went for walks along the River Dart (the subject of her second collection “Dart”).

Anyone wanting to learn poems by heart would do well to get hold of a copy of Ted Hughes’s anthology, “By Heart”, which Faber are reissuing next month. Hughes recommended a technique, invented in antiquity, which had become “the basis of learning in the Christian Middle Ages, when books were scarce”. You have to connect each word or phrase in the poem with an image in your mind and then join these images in a sequence—the more outlandish the juxtapositions, the better. Someone should get the mayor a copy.

Emma Hogan wrote Notes on a Voice on T.S. Eliot