"The most important tribute any human being can pay to a poem or a piece of prose he or she really loves is to learn it by heart. Not by brain, by heart; the expression is vital"
About this Quote
Steiner is needling a modern reflex: to treat literature as information you can outsource to a device, a syllabus, a “takeaway.” “Learn it by heart” sounds quaint until he sharpens the blade with that correction: not by brain, by heart. He’s not rejecting intelligence; he’s rejecting a form of intelligence that keeps art at arm’s length, safe inside commentary and citation. Memorization, for Steiner, is the opposite of academic distance. It’s consent. It’s letting language move in and take up residence.
The line also smuggles in a critique of criticism itself. As a professional critic, Steiner knows how easily interpretation can become a substitute for intimacy. To memorize a poem is to stop performing mastery over it and start submitting to its rhythm, its pressure, its weird turns of sound. The “tribute” isn’t applause; it’s incorporation. You carry the work into unplanned moments - boredom, grief, desire - where its meaning can’t be managed.
Context matters: Steiner wrote in the long shadow of European catastrophe and cultural rupture, and he was famously anxious about what happens when high culture becomes mere décor. “By heart” names a moral wager: that language can form a person, not just entertain one. His insistence that “the expression is vital” treats a common idiom as a cultural technology. Heart is memory with stakes: vulnerable, fallible, lived. The subtext is almost polemical: if you can’t be bothered to remember what you claim to love, maybe you don’t love it - you just like being seen near it.
The line also smuggles in a critique of criticism itself. As a professional critic, Steiner knows how easily interpretation can become a substitute for intimacy. To memorize a poem is to stop performing mastery over it and start submitting to its rhythm, its pressure, its weird turns of sound. The “tribute” isn’t applause; it’s incorporation. You carry the work into unplanned moments - boredom, grief, desire - where its meaning can’t be managed.
Context matters: Steiner wrote in the long shadow of European catastrophe and cultural rupture, and he was famously anxious about what happens when high culture becomes mere décor. “By heart” names a moral wager: that language can form a person, not just entertain one. His insistence that “the expression is vital” treats a common idiom as a cultural technology. Heart is memory with stakes: vulnerable, fallible, lived. The subtext is almost polemical: if you can’t be bothered to remember what you claim to love, maybe you don’t love it - you just like being seen near it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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