Power of poetry

THE petition to the Government to stop making GCSE students learn poetry by heart has left me stunned (Mail).

Compared to the ‘difficulty’ of learning a few lines from 15 poems, when I did the equivalent exam in the Fifties, I had to be able to quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Twelfth Night, the Goldsmith play She Stoops To Conquer, Chesterton’s and Sheridan’s essays, four

novels and four books of poetry. I can still quote beautiful lines from Shakespeare and poetry I studied.

When I hear the complaints from today’s 16- year- olds claiming to be studying English literature, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. What makes me despair is that this malaise is infecting our universities. BRIAN O’HARE, Newry, Co. Down. WHEN I sat my English O-level in 1969, answers had to be supported by specific references to the texts, not necessarily quotations.

Those who regurgitated great chunks of the set books did not receive high marks, which is the view of the Department of Education.

My contemporaries would have derided the idea of taking set texts into an exam. We were accustomed to studying difficult books and learning passages by heart.

Standards have fallen and exams have been dumbed down from primary school to university and teacher training colleges, where the cycle of ignorance begins again.

I taught for 32 years in secondary schools and in my final years I was shocked by how little younger teachers knew about literature.

KENNETH MILLS, Hampton, Middlesex. I LEARNT poems off by heart at primary school. When my mother was in a nursing home, I read poetry to her and other residents, many of whom had dementia. They may not have remembered what they had for lunch, but they often joined in with poems they had learned at school. Favourites included Wordsworth and If by Rudyard Kipling. I hope the pleasure of learning poetry will not become a lost skill. Mrs ROSALYN BARBER,

Hindhead, Surrey.