Does Poetry Make You Smarter? Memorizing Verse, Nursery Rhymes and IQ

No study shows that reading, writing or memorizing poetry raises IQ. The strongest related findings are narrower: young children who knew more nursery rhymes at age 3 became better readers by age 6, even after accounting for IQ, while a 130-year-old experiment by William James found that weeks of memorizing verse made him no faster at memorizing new verse (about 50 seconds per line before training and 57 seconds after).

Poetry has a reputation as a workout for the mind, and schools once required pupils to learn long poems by heart partly for that reason. This article covers what happens when people train their memory on verse, how rhyme helps children learn to read, what brain scans of poetry readers show, whether studying the arts transfers to other abilities, and why poets have always looked so clever.

The idea that learning poems by heart strengthens memory in general is old, and it was one of the first claims in psychology to be tested.

• William James's experiment: In The Principles of Psychology (1890), James described testing the claim on himself. He learned 158 lines of a Victor Hugo poem over eight days, spent 38 days memorizing the whole first book of Milton's Paradise Lost, and then learned another 158 lines of the Hugo poem. Before the training he needed about 50 seconds per line; afterwards he needed about 57. He persuaded several colleagues to repeat the test, and their results showed small gains at best, which James attributed partly to practice on the test poems themselves.

• Skill stays with the material: In a classic study by Anders Ericsson, William Chase and Steve Faloon, a student who practised for more than 230 hours raised his memory span for digits from 7 to 79. When the material was switched from digits to letters, his span fell back to about six. The memory skill he had built was a set of strategies for digits, and it did not carry over to other material.

• Memory champions: Eleanor Maguire and colleagues studied people who excelled at events such as the World Memory Championships. Their superior memory was not explained by exceptional intellectual ability or by unusual brain structure. They used learned strategies, especially placing items along an imagined route.

The closest modern evidence for verse comes from acting. Helga and Tony Noice developed a four-week theatre course for older adults that teaches them to learn and perform lines with full meaning and emotion. In a 2004 study of 124 adults aged 60 to 86, the theatre group gained more than a no-treatment group on tests of word recall and problem solving, and gained more than a visual arts group in more areas. A 2013 follow-up with 115 residents of retirement homes, assigned at random to the course or a waiting list, found gains on everyday task performance and on some cognitive tests. These were short, small studies run by the people who designed the program, and the outcomes were memory and problem-solving tests, not IQ tests.

The most interesting finding about poetry and thinking involves the simplest poems of all.

• The nursery rhyme study: Peter Bryant, Lynette Bradley and their colleagues followed 64 English children from age 3 years 4 months to 6 years 3 months. Children who knew more nursery rhymes at the start became better readers and spellers over the next three years. The link held after accounting for social background, IQ and the children's early phonological skills.

• The route: Knowing nursery rhymes predicted later sensitivity to rhyme and to the separate sounds within words, called "phonological awareness." When the authors adjusted for that later sound awareness, the link between nursery rhymes and reading disappeared. Rhymes appear to help children hear the sound structure of words, which helps them learn to read.

This is a near-transfer effect: practice with the sounds of language helps a closely related language skill. The study was small and observational, so families who share nursery rhymes may also differ in other ways. It does not show that rhymes raise intelligence.

Poetry also exposes readers to unusual words. Vocabulary is one of the best single measures of verbal ability, as explained in the article on what vocabulary tests measure, and wide reading builds it over years. The broader evidence on reading and verbal scores is covered in the article on reading books and IQ.

Brain imaging studies show that poetry is processed somewhat differently from other text, though none of them tested whether reading poetry changes intelligence.

• Poetry and prose: Adam Zeman and colleagues at the University of Exeter scanned 13 lecturers and senior graduate students in English while they read passages ranging from a heating installation manual to sonnets and their own favourite poems. Poetry activated regions linked to introspection, such as the posterior cingulate cortex, and the more emotional passages engaged regions that also respond to music. The participants were experts, and 13 people is a very small sample.

• Chills from verse: Eugen Wassiliwizky and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics showed that recited poetry can produce chills and measurable goosebumps, and that these peak moments engage the brain's reward circuitry, much as music does.

Brain activity during reading shows what the brain is doing at that moment. A region lighting up while someone reads a sonnet is not evidence that the person's reasoning ability has grown.

The claim that poetry makes people smarter belongs to a larger claim about the arts. Ellen Winner and Monica Cooper analyzed studies from 1950 to 1998 on arts education and academic achievement. Correlational studies found that students who studied the arts had higher achievement. Experimental studies, which can test cause and effect, gave no evidence that arts study improved verbal or mathematics achievement.

Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet reached the same conclusion for chess, music and working memory training. Practice improves the skill being practised, and gains on distant abilities such as general intelligence are close to zero once studies use proper control groups. The parallel case of music lessons is covered in the article on musicians and IQ. Nobody has run a comparable trial for poetry, and there is no reason to expect a different result. A similar pattern appears for competitive debating, where the measured gains are mainly in reading and argument skills.

Poets do tend to be verbally gifted, but that is mostly a matter of who becomes a poet.

• Historical estimates: In 1926 Catharine Cox estimated the childhood and early adult IQs of 301 eminent people from their biographies. Her 52 poets, novelists and dramatists averaged estimated IQs of 141 before age 17 and 149 from ages 17 to 26, and she argued that the true figure was higher. These are guesses based on records such as how early a child read or wrote verse, not test scores, and Cox rated the reliability of the data for this group at only .57 and .64. Shakespeare was left out entirely because too little is known about his childhood.

• Openness to experience: People who enjoy poetry tend to score high on the personality trait "openness to experience," the tendency to seek out new ideas and aesthetic experiences. Robert McCrae found that a questionnaire item about feeling a chill or wave of excitement when reading poetry or looking at art was one of the best markers of openness in most of the 51 cultures he examined. Openness in turn correlates with intelligence: a meta-analysis by Jeromy Anglim and colleagues of more than 160,000 people found an average correlation of about .20, stronger for crystallized intelligence (knowledge and vocabulary) than for fluid reasoning.

• Education and family: People who read and write poetry as adults usually have more education and grew up with more books at home. Both are linked to verbal test scores and would make poetry readers score higher even if poetry itself did nothing.

Selection runs in one direction here: strong verbal ability and an open, curious personality make people more likely to love poetry. The evidence that poetry produces those traits is far weaker.

No study shows that poetry raises IQ. Rhymes may help young children learn to read, and reading poetry can build vocabulary, but these are narrow language skills rather than general intelligence.

It improves your memory for that poem and perhaps your skill at memorizing similar verse. William James's 1890 test and later studies of memory training found that the skill does not carry over to memory in general.

Eminent poets were very bright on historical estimates, but those figures are guesses from biographies. Verbally able, open-minded people are more likely to take up poetry, so the link mostly reflects who becomes a poet.

Knowing nursery rhymes at age 3 predicted better reading at age 6 in one well-known study, apparently because rhymes help children hear the sounds within words. That is a benefit for reading, not a demonstrated rise in IQ.

Brain scans show that poetry engages regions linked to introspection and to reward. These studies measured activity during reading and did not test lasting changes in thinking ability.

Poetry does not make you smarter in the sense of raising IQ, and no study has tested whether it does. Rhyme appears to help young children learn to read, and verse can build vocabulary, while memorizing poems trains memory for poems rather than memory in general. Much of poetry's reputation comes from the verbally gifted and open-minded people who are drawn to it. If you want to see where your verbal and reasoning abilities stand, try an online IQ test built by psychometricians.

1. James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology (Chapter 16, Memory). Henry Holt. [psychclassics.yorku.ca](. psychclassics.yorku.ca

2. Ericsson, K. A., Chase, W. G., & Faloon, S. (1980). Acquisition of a memory skill. Science, 208(4448), 1181-1182. [doi.org/10.1126/science.7375930](. doi.org

3. Maguire, E. A., Valentine, E. R., Wilding, J. M., & Kapur, N. (2003). Routes to remembering: The brains behind superior memory. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 90-95. [doi.org/10.1038/nn988](. doi.org

4. Noice, H., Noice, T., & Staines, G. (2004). A short-term intervention to enhance cognitive and affective functioning in older adults. Journal of Aging and Health, 16(4), 562-585. [doi.org/10.1177/0898264304265819](. doi.org

5. Noice, H., & Noice, T. (2013). Extending the reach of an evidence-based theatrical intervention. Experimental Aging Research, 39(4), 398-418. [doi.org/10.1080/0361073X.2013.808116](. doi.org

6. Bryant, P. E., Bradley, L., Maclean, M., & Crossland, J. (1989). Nursery rhymes, phonological skills and reading. Journal of Child Language, 16(2), 407-428. [doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900010485](. doi.org

7. Zeman, A., Milton, F., Smith, A., & Rylance, R. (2013). By heart: An fMRI study of brain activation by poetry and prose. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20(9-10), 132-158. [news-archive.exeter.ac.uk](. news-archive.exeter.ac.uk

8. Wassiliwizky, E., Koelsch, S., Wagner, V., Jacobsen, T., & Menninghaus, W. (2017). The emotional power of poetry: Neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(8), 1229-1240. [doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsx069](. doi.org

9. Winner, E., & Cooper, M. (2000). Mute those claims: No evidence (yet) for a causal link between arts study and academic achievement. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 34(3/4), 11-75. [doi.org/10.2307/3333637](. doi.org

10. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2017). Does far transfer exist? Negative evidence from chess, music, and working memory training. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(6), 515-520. [doi.org/10.1177/0963721417712760](. doi.org

11. Cox, C. M. (1926). Genetic studies of genius: Vol. 2. The early mental traits of three hundred geniuses. Stanford University Press. [archive.org](. archive.org

12. McCrae, R. R. (2007). Aesthetic chills as a universal marker of openness to experience. Motivation and Emotion, 31(1), 5-11. [doi.org/10.1007/s11031-007-9053-1](. doi.org

13. Anglim, J., Dunlop, P. D., Wee, S., Horwood, S., Wood, J. K., & Marty, A. (2022). Personality and intelligence: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 148(5-6), 301-336. [doi.org/10.1037/bul0000373](. doi.org

Hero image: Bird feather, inkwell, pen and inkblot, by Tool Dude8mm (mechanicalcaveman.com), CC BY 2.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.