Pupils should return to learning poems by rote, urges Rushdie

SCHOOLCHILDREN should be made to learn poems and prose by rote to “enrich their relationship with language”, Sir Salman Rushdie has claimed.

The author said it was a “real loss” that pupils were no longer made to memorise famous poems and said that he could recite the whole of Lewis Carroll’s The Walrus and The Carpenter.

Appearing at the Hay Festival, Sir Salman refused to comment on reports that he had recently had relationships with both Nigella Lawson and Nikki Milovanovic, a Canadian pop star.

A Sunday newspaper had suggested he had been going on secret dates with the singer, but he said press interest in his love life was “bizarre”, adding: “All I can say is, don’t read that rubbish.”

As he discussed sex in literature, he joked: “Most of us don’t get enough sex anyway.”

Sir Salman said that memorising works of literature had become a “lost” art.

“It does seem as if it was something that we all had and we all felt gave us some- thing and now people don’t do it,” he said.

“It is a lost thing but it is a real loss in education. There are some people I know who are just able to carry around absurd amounts of poetry in their head, [Christopher] Hitchens, [Martin] Amis, you can point at them and say ‘Byron’ and they would give you 20 minutes.

“I envy that, being able to

‘ It is a lost art … that enriches your relationship with language’

walk around with that in your head.”

Sir Salman said that his two sons, Zafar and Milan, who both went to private schools in north London, had gone “through the English education system and neither of them was asked to memorise anything”.

He added: “So that suggests to me that it doesn’t happen.

“It is a simple exercise that enriches the way you enjoy poems and enriches your relationship with language and once you have done it at that age it stays with you forever.”