Perhaps the idea of memorizing poetry seems quaint in 2026. Perhaps it seems like it would require a huge time investment that would be a waste without continued investment in the future. I wish to recount my experience memorizing "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe which convinced me that both these things are wrong.

Background: Spaced Repetition

About two years ago, I picked up Anki (a spaced repetition system) as a daily habit. Spaced repetition is based on the idea that the act of recall of a fact or piece of knowledge actively strengthens the knowledges and makes it more permanently resident in long-term memory. If you memorize a fact today, you might remember it tomorrow, then forget about it. If you review that fact tomorrow, you will likely remember it for a week or so. Each instance of review makes the memory stronger, such that you can review the fact in increasing intervals.

Spaced repetion is a more efficient method of learning which is backed by evidence. The increasing review interval means that you might review an individual card for a grand total of 20 minutes over a lifetime, so the method scales to thousands (or tens of thousands) of cards. This role of scheduling the optimal review intervals for thousands of pieces of knowledge is a perfect task for a computer program like Anki.

To sum up, spaced repetion makes memory a choice. If I want to remember something, I make a card for it and trust the system to make sure it ends up in my long-term memory.

Spaced repetion has been transformative for me in that I truly believe the knowledge I make into cards will be with me for the rest of my life. This greatly reduces the anxiety I feel when approaching a large textbook or project that requires specialized knowledge. Before spaced repetition, I would feel that if I let a day or a week or a month slip by without engaging with the project, I would lose all my progress and all my efforts would be wasted. For me, Anki is a ratchet that I trust to help me hold my place in my knowledge.

Background: The Raven

"The Raven" is a very famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe. It is my favorite poem because of its lyrical nature. Without a hint of sarcasm or jest, my favorite recitation of "The Raven" is from the very first Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons. James Earl Jones had the perfect voice to accentuate musical nature of Poe's words, and he knocked it out of the park.

My wife and I watch all the Treehouse of Horror episodes every Halloween season. When we watched it two years ago, I can only describe what I felt after watching (re-watching) this recitation of "The Raven" as "hungry". My love for this poem in particular was re-kindled, and I felt that I wanted to have it with me always. More deeply than simply being able to read it anytime I chose, I wanted to have this poem as a part of me. Since Anki was already a part of my daily habits, I finally felt I had the tools to make good on this project.

The How

"The Raven" is not a short poem: it is eighteen six-line stanzas. I knew at the outset that I would have to break this project up into multiple smaller parts. I decided on the following. Each stanza would be one task. I memorized each stanza in the traditional way: spending 10-20 minutes repeating the stanza to myself, covering up lines and trying to remember them, and generally "brute forcing" it. I ended each of these memorization sessions by making "overlapping cloze" cards for that stanza in Anki. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of an overlapping cloze, here is an example taken from the first few lines of "The Raven":

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

Next     While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

The prompt for the card is a few lines of the poem, and the answer to the card is the next line. Since each stanza is six lines, each stanza gets six cards in this fashion.

I proceeded this way for the entire poem. I spread out the stanzas so that I wasn't overloading my deck with new material. I also had significant periods of time where I was busy with other things and not memorizing new stanzas. I created my first card in December of 2024 and my last card just last week. Altogether, I would estimate I spent about 8 hours actively memorizing and reviewing these cards over the course of that year and some change.

The result? I feel like I have "The Raven" solidly memorized. I can recite it with few errors. Some parts (especially the later stanzas for which I have had cards for a shorter duration of time) aren't as smooth as others. Importantly, because of the spaced repetition, I expect the whole poem to get smoother over time, not the opposite.

The Why

What do I make of my experience? I'm a complete convert.

Sometimes snippets of "The Raven" will pop into my head as I am commuting or doing chores. It's hard for me to describe what a joy this has been. "The Raven" is now a close companion for me.

I appreciate recitations of "The Raven" much more deeply now. You know how you can enjoy a very familiar song more deeply by knowing the lyrics by heart? Knowing the words that are coming enhances the experience because you can sing along and experience the song in real-time rather than waste time processing the lyrics. That's how I feel about "The Raven" now. I can "sing" along, and I feel this plugs the poem directly into the emotional center of my brain.

I have a much deeper appreciation for the minor details of the poem. As an example, consider this snippet from the fifth stanza:

     But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
    And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
            Merely this and nothing more.

Note the different punctuation on "Lenore?" and "Lenore!". I interpret the first as the narrator's recollection of his demeanor at the time. He feels a little silly, a little nervous. He quietly, in a nervous whisper, interrogates the empty hallway, "Lenore?". The way any reasonable person would. The second "Lenore!" is echoed back to him as he actually says it, what he can't even admit to himself: he's terrified and he can't control the terror from leaking into his voice. As becomes clear later throughout the poem, he's driven mad by his grief, haunted by it, and will be for the rest of his life.

I really believe that if I had not memorized the poem, I wouldn't have noticed this detail. Only as the poem became increasingly familiar to me was I able to engage with it so deeply that minor details became increasingly important to me.

Conclusion

I now believe that good poems beg to be memorized, and doing so enhances my experience of them. Having Anki as a tool greatly increases the number of poems I think I can memorize in a lifetime, and also makes available as memorization targets a larger number of poems that I may have previously considered to be too long.