To people of a certain age, memorizing and reciting poetry was all in a school-day's work, no more or less exotic than dissecting a frog or puzzling over a mathematical equation. Shakespeare and Frost, Tennyson and Eliot, Auden and Marvell -- all part of a rich banquet now reduced to a few scraps of leftover lines that emerge from memory at unexpected moments, still affording genuine pleasure and instruction.

But we fear that if poetry is a pleasure at all for most people these days, it is primarily a private one, enjoyed in the confines of their own minds. This is a shame, because poetry is at its most poetic -- is most completely a poem -- when it is read aloud, or better yet, recited by someone who has come under its spell and made it his or her own, word and rhyme, metaphor and meter. (Maybe that's why they call it learning something “by heart.”)

For this reason, we were thrilled to read in last Tuesday's Close-Up section staff writer Alex Hanson's profile of John Marshall of Corinth, this year’s Vermont winner of something called the Poetry Out Loud competition. This is a five-year-old poetry recitation competition for high school students sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation. Marshall, a 15-year-old student at The Sharon Academy, will now take part in the national contest on April 26 in Washington, competing against 52 other participants who also will be reciting their poetic selections from memory. Participants choose three poems from the expansive Poetry Out Loud database, one of which must be shorter than 25 lines and one of which must have been written before 1900.

It's disappointing that so few high schools in the Upper Valley are participating in this interesting program: Besides The Sharon Academy, only Oxbow Union High School, Randolph Union High School and Thetford Academy participated in the Vermont contest, while Lebanon High was the only New Hampshire school in the Upper Valley to enter a contestant in the state competition.

There are many reasons why this competition is valuable. Pragmatically, it certainly seems likely to improve students' ability to speak with assurance in public settings, a skill not to be scoffed at even in the digital age. Even a cursory survey of the American landscape suggests that public speaking is rapidly becoming a lost art, to the impoverishment of the nation's political discourse, for just one example. And when it comes to future vocations, lawyer and teacher are but two professions for which the ability to speak in compelling fashion in public would be good preparation. (It might even increase participation at Town Meeting, where people often say they are too intimidated to speak up in front of a crowd.)

We're also reasonably confident that memorization of poetry is an important way to increase reading comprehension, just as recitation is sure to deepen appreciation of the language and images employed by the poet. And the process can have the curious effect of somehow imprinting syntax, sound and rhythm on the hard-wiring of the brain in a way that sometimes manifests itself later to good effect in one's own prose, or poetry.

Most of all, memorization and recitation can spark an enduring devotion to poetry, which at its greatest becomes a prism through which to view and understand experience. Time, as Auden reminded us, worships language and forgives, everyone by whom it lives.