Memorizing Poetry

Memorization used to be a huge part of literary education, but now it's a bad word. Jim Holt says it's pleasureful to memorize poetry and recommends it instead of an iPod: "in the end I’ll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in." But he also says it's not intellectually worthwhile and that people don't like you to recite your poems: "Nor, as I have found, will memorizing poetry make you more popular. Rather the reverse."