Common measure, innit? You can do lots more than Dickinson.
I can only remember poems when they are sung, but then I do so quite well, which puts me in the odd position of being able to remember "Johnie Armstrong" in every detail, for example, but struggling after line 3 of "Lycidas", or (yesterday, so it rankles) nearly misquoting the *first two* line of "An Horatian Ode". Either that or I have poor taste. (Not that "Johnie Armstrong" is a bad poem, but it's not quite in the Milton or Marvell class). Himself has a perfect memory for anything in verse, which exerts no quality filters at all, thus his repertoire includes among other things, all of "Tam O'Shanter", "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle", great swodges of Tennyson and Browning, and rejected National Song Contest entries from the 1970s. I recently met an undergraduate with the same facility. "It's a curse," he said morosely. "You remember lyrics by The Field Mice."
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I can only remember poems when they are sung, but then I do so quite well, which puts me in the odd position of being able to remember "Johnie Armstrong" in every detail, for example, but struggling after line 3 of "Lycidas", or (yesterday, so it rankles) nearly misquoting the *first two* line of "An Horatian Ode". Either that or I have poor taste. (Not that "Johnie Armstrong" is a bad poem, but it's not quite in the Milton or Marvell class). Himself has a perfect memory for anything in verse, which exerts no quality filters at all, thus his repertoire includes among other things, all of "Tam O'Shanter", "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle", great swodges of Tennyson and Browning, and rejected National Song Contest entries from the 1970s. I recently met an undergraduate with the same facility. "It's a curse," he said morosely. "You remember lyrics by The Field Mice."