Poetry By Heart is an inspiring competition for students in Years 10 to 13 in schools and colleges in England to learn and to recite poems by heart.  Not in an arm-waving, props-supported thespian extravaganza, but as the outward and audible manifestation of an inwardly-understood and enjoyed poem.

The competition is a pyramid of participation from individual classrooms to whole school/college contests, then county contests, regional semi-finals and the grand final, held in recent years at Homerton College, Cambridge. In the process, pupils foster deep personal connections with the poems chosen and bring poetry alive for their friends, families and communities.

Each student is first challenged to memorise and recite two poems – one published before 1914 and one in or after 1914.  Students choose their pre-1914 poem either from the timeline anthology of 1000 years of poetry on this website or from the new Shakespeare sonnets showcase launching in January 2017. They choose their post-1914 poem either from the timeline anthology of 1000 years of poetry or from the First World War Poetry showcase, both on this website. For the regional and national finals they learn a third poem.

In 2016-17 there is also a mini-competition to learn just one sonnet written by William Shakespeare – teachers can take part in that competition too!

Poetry By Heart successfully engages young people from diverse social backgrounds and all types of school in personal discovery of the pleasures of poetry. Teachers who have organised Poetry By Heart competitions have told us it:

*was a catalyst for new approaches to poetry teaching, learning and enjoyment
*helped them to raise the profile of poetry in school/college
*helped them to focus pupil attention on the sounds of poetry as part of its meaning and pleasure
*gave their students a valued opportunity for local and national recognition

They also said their students:
*enjoyed poetry more
* were more willing to take on new challenges
*had a better understanding of how poetry works
*were better able to use memory techniques
*were more confident about speaking in public

Want to see what it’s all about? Click on this link to watch a short video filmed by Cambridge TV at the 2016 national finals.

Poetry By Heart video

At the 2015 Poetry By Heart national finals, we took a camera and some questions and spoke to the students from different backgrounds and different schools, unscripted, about their experiences of Poetry By Heart. The result is below. Please share it with everyone you possibly can who may be interested. Spread the word on social media. Put it in newsletters. Show it in classrooms. Show it in assemblies. Send it out into the world!

Hear From The Students from Poetry By Heart on Vimeo.

Ever since I first started reading poetry in earnest, more than forty years ago, I’ve always thought its meaning has as much to do with sound as it does to do with sense. Poetry, crucially, is an acoustic form. It’s emotional noise. That is why it’s often able to move us before we completely understand it. Its sounds allow us to receive it in our hearts, as well as in our heads.

It has always been my hope in setting up Poetry by Heart that we would give young people the opportunity to enjoy a wider range of poetry than they usually find in their preparation for exams.  We want to offer new ways of finding pleasure and confidence in a part of the curriculum where such things can be in short supply. The sort of pleasure and confidence, in fact, that adds tremendously to young people’s self-esteem, to their verbal skills, to their powers of communication, and so to a more fulfilled life and greater opportunities.  The competition is an end in itself, but it’s also a gateway, a beginning.

Poetry By Heart is designed to put the emphasis on learning by heart, not on learning by rote. It is about understanding and remembering the deep recurring truths about our experience as humans, in terms that are especially beautiful and resonant, It is about doing this in a pleasure-filled way. And it is part of the same benevolent revolution in poetry-proving and poetry-teaching that formed a part of the original intention in founding the Poetry Archive during my ten years as Poet Laureate.

Most of us have some recollection of being made to learn things when we were kids ourselves, and most of us can remember bits or all of those poems in our older age. This tells us several things, I think. It tells us how important it is to learn good stuff, so that our heads are full of nourishing words and not full of junk. It tells us this good stuff changes its meanings in very interesting ways as the years pass and the words stay in our memories. It tells us that despite or because of the effort involved in learning by heart, we as humans have a primitive appetite for it. It makes us feel good. It makes us find ourselves.

When Samuel Johnson was ruminating about the value of literature, he said it helped him ‘enjoy and endure’ his existence. Those two words form the foundation of our competition. We want it to be fun, as it encourages pupils to discover new pleasures and fulfilments, but we want it to be serious as well: an excitement and a dare. To demonstrate, in fact, the marvellous form of two-way travelling that poetry allows us: into ourselves, and out into the world, at one and the same time.

Student performances in all rounds of the competition must be judged and scored using these criteria. There are downloadable score sheets for competition organisers to use on the Competition Resources page of the Resources and Downloads section of this website.

Understanding 1-7 points

This category is to evaluate whether the student exhibits an understanding of the poem is his or her recitation.  A strong performance relies on a powerful internalisation of the poem rather than distracting dramatic gestures.  In a strong performance, the sense of the poem is powerfully and clearly conveyed to the audience.  The student displays an interpretation that deepens and enlivens the poem.  Meanings, messages, allusions, irony, tones of voice and other nuances are captured by the performance.  A low score is awarded if the interpretation obscures the meaning of the poem or makes use of affected character voices and accents, inappropriate tone and inflection, singing, distracting and excessive gestures, or unnecessary emoting.

Performance 1-7 points

This category is to evaluate the overall success of the performance, the degree to which the recitation has become more than the sum of its parts.  Has the student captivated the audience with the language of the poem?  Did the student bring the audience to a better understanding of the poem?  Did the contestant’s physical presence enhance the recitation, engaging the audience through appropriate body language, confidence and eye contact?  Does the student understand and show mastery of the art of recitation?  The judges will use this score to measure how impressed they were by the recitation, and whether the recitation has honoured the poem.   A low score will be awarded for recitations that are poorly presented, ineffective in conveying the meaning of the poem, or conveyed in a manner inappropriate to the poem.

Accuracy 1-4 marks

A separate judge will mark missed or incorrect words during the recitation. Students will score a full 4 marks for a word-perfect recitation; 3 for a small number of errors which do not significantly affect meaning and/or flow; 2 for a recitation where the errors do affect meaning and/or flow; 1 for a recitation where occasional use is made of the prompter; 0 for a recitation which requires considerable prompting.

In the event of a very close tie between two or more students, judges should consider the the level of challenge the student has chosen. This might be indicated in the variety of poems selected for recitation, with different styles, moods, language varieties, voices or settings. It might also be indicated by poem difficulty. A poem with difficult content conveys complex, sophisticated ideas, that the student will be challenged to grasp and express.  A poem with difficult language will have complexity of diction and syntax, metre and rhyme scheme, and shifts in tone or mood.  Poem length is also considered in difficulty but bear in mind that longer poems are not necessarily more difficult than shorter ones.  Judges may also consider the diversity of a student’s recitations with this score; a student is less likely to score well in this category when judges note that a student’s style of interpretation remains the same regardless of poem choice or challenge.

 New model for 2016-17!

Schools and colleges first hold a Poetry By Heart competition (as in previous years) and select a winner and runner-up using our judging criteria. Schools and colleges will receive information about how to set up, run and judge a great competition, as well as having our experienced team on hand by email, telephone and Skype for support, guidance and encouragement.

After the fun of the competition, the organising teacher or school librarian enters their winner and runner-up for the county phase of the contest. To do this, s/he arranges for these two students to be filmed reciting their poems and for the student videos to be uploaded to our secure uploader system. This replaces the ‘live’ and in-person county contests in previous years – no more clashes with parents’ evenings or long journeys out into dark, snowy February nights!

We want students to feel that they were able to submit their very best performance, not the one with the attendant pressure of the competition. However, the focus of the video should be the student’s recitation not fancy video production. These guidelines should help:

• the uploaded video is to be shot in one take (ie not edited from multiple recordings), although the student can have as many goes as they like before selecting one video
• the video is to be produced from a single fixed camera (no ‘artistic’ zooming or tracking, or cutting between angles)
• the shot is to be a fixed knees-head shot so that all videos are comparable
• the student is to be filmed against a plain background with no other sounds or visuals in shot

Our well established team of poets and educators will then judge the student videos and select a winner for each of 49 counties in England, plus one extra “wild card” winner. These 50 students will then be invited, supported by their teacher/librarian, to compete at the prestigious, exciting and fun regional and national finals event. First, county winners compete to become regional champion, and in the grand finale, the regional champions battle it out to take the national champion’s trophy home!