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When the Internet offers a superabundance of material to read, watch, listen to and play, it's easy to skim over text and half-listen to broadcasts. But the British government is inviting schoolchildren to put down their cellphones, turn off their news feeds and spend a long time lingering over a poem — so long that they learn it by heart.

The United Kingdom's Department for Education is funding a nationwide poetry-reciting contest called Poetry By Heart, similar in structure to Poetry Out Loud in the U.S. and other poetry competitions in Canada and Ireland. The contest, at the county level, requires students to memorize two poems from a list of 130 choices and recite the poems by heart in a series of competitions.

English poet Jean Sprackland helped select the poems at the heart of the contest. She joins NPR's Scott Simon to discuss the pleasures of poetry memorization.

Neil Jordan is best known as a filmmaker — he directed The Crying Game, Michael Collins, Interview with the Vampire and the Showtime series The Borgias — but he began his career as a writer. His first novel, The Past, was published in Ireland in 1980 to great acclaim.

The novel follows an enigmatic protagonist on his search for his family's secrets in a Cornish seaside town. Jordan joins NPR's Scott Simon to talk about The Past, which has been reissued in the United States by Soft Skull Press.

Take just a moment to estimate how many songs you know by heart. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands?

Now... how many poems do you have memorized?

For most modern readers, even poetry fans, that number's pretty low. But Poetry By Heart, a new competition in the U.K., is seeking to bring the art of poetry memorization to a new generation.

On Weekend Edition Saturday, poet Jean Sprackland — who helped assemble the list of 130 poems eligible for Poetry By Heart — spoke to NPR's Scott Simon about the joys of memorization. As it turns out, both Sprackland and Simon still remember texts they learned years ago: for Sprackland, it's John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"; for Simon, it's Macbeth's last soliloquy.

Sprackland says that a poem known by heart becomes a part of you, and "it's something that lives with you forever." For some, that might stay true even if you lose a few of the words: in 2005, linguist Geoff Nunberg commented on Fresh Air that he still feels like he "owns" poems that he can't perfectly recite. But if a memorized poem stays with you forever, then learning a text comes with some pressure. Let's say you want to up the number of poems you know by heart.... how do you choose which works to carry with you for the rest of your life?

Some poems, marked by regular rhymes and rhythms, are simply easier to memorize. After all, the predictable patterns of verse are the reason why poems are usually easier to learn by heart than prose. But it's not all about picking the easiest poem to learn; you'll want one with emotional impact, rich imagery and enough shades of meaning that it's worth returning to again and again. And then there's always the question of fame: while an obscure text might be of great personal significance, learning a poem that's more famous can make for a pretty good party trick.

The 10 poems below, selected from the 130 in the Poetry By Heart anthology, are particularly rewarding to memorize. But while this list is a good place to start, ultimately the decision is entirely personal. When a poem hits you right in the gut, you'll know it's time to start memorizing.

Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats

Jean Sprackland told NPR's Scott Simon that even before she knew what they meant, she loved how Keats' words "tasted and felt."

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!

Paradise Lost, Book 1, 242-270, John Milton

Satan's response to his expulsion from heaven, in its fury and arrogance, is recognizably more human than demonic.

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This famously drug-fueled dreamscape manages to be simultaneously haunting and energetic.

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelly

Easy to memorize and fun to recite, this classic sonnet is great to have on hand as a rejoinder to the over-confident.

"Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"

Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold

In a poem perfect for today's apocalypse-obsessed, Arnold mixes despair and last-ditch hope.

But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar

Invitation to Love, Paul Dunbar

Dunbar's love poem shines with sincerity, and features repetition that translates well to speech and memory.

Come to my heart and bring it to rest

The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats

This classic reads like a horror story, but there's a powerful moral judgment behind the bloody monsters.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

The Fish, Elizabeth Bishop

Deceptively simple, this description of a catch builds towards a euphoric release.

And everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

Sea Canes, Derek Walcott

Once memorized, this brief, lovely elegy becomes a constantly-accessible comfort for the mourning.

but out of what is lost grows something stronger

, Rita Dove

From a single word of Swedish, Dove builds a meditation on change and the power of language.

You start out with one thing, end
up with another

What works would you recommend to someone looking for the perfect poem to memorize?

Where does the phrase "the whole nine yards" come from? In 1982, William Safire called that "one of the great etymological mysteries of our time."

He thought the phrase originally referred to the capacity of a cement truck in cubic yards. But there are plenty of other theories.

Some people say it dates back to when square-riggers had three masts, each with three yards supporting the sails, so the whole nine yards meant the sails were fully set.

Another popular story holds that it refers to the length of an ammunition belt on World War II fighters — when a pilot had exhausted his ammunition, he said he had shot off the whole nine yards. Or it was the amount of cloth in the queen's bridal train, or in the Shroud of Turin. Or it had to do with a fourth-down play in football. Or it came from a joke about a prodigiously well-endowed Scotsman who gets his kilt caught in a door.

The Internet is full of just-so stories like these. They're often shaky in their facts about ammunition belts or cement trucks, but they come with assurances that the information came firsthand from an old Naval gunnery instructor or a Scottish tailor.

It used to be hard to debunk these tales, since the only way to track the expressions down was by rooting around in library stacks and newspaper morgues in search of a revealing early citation. But with the vast historical collections of books and newspapers that are now online, etymology has joined the list of activities you can do in your pajamas.

Word-sleuths traced the modern use of "the whole nine yards" as far back as a 1956 article in a magazine called Kentucky Happy Hunting Ground. Now they've discovered an even earlier version of the phrase, "the whole six yards," which was used in the rural South as early as 1912. That's still how the phrase goes in parts of the South, but it was inflated to "nine yards" when it caught on elsewhere, the same way the early 20th-century "cloud seven" was upgraded to our "cloud nine."

The unearthing of those early sources was deemed important enough to warrant a story in The New York Times, not an organ that ordinarily treats etymological discoveries as breaking news. True, the findings don't actually settle what if anything the phrase originally referred to. But they put the kibosh on the stories about World War II and the one about cement trucks, which hadn't been invented yet — though, actually, none of these stories was very plausible in the first place. `

Of course there could be a real story behind the expression, even if it's no more than a family joke about the long scarves that Aunt Florence used to knit as Christmas presents. But it could also be that somebody just plucked the words out of the air one Tuesday morning. One way or the other, the real birth of the expression was when somebody passed it along without caring what "nine yards" referred to.

The fact is that once you've said "the whole" it doesn't matter what words you finish it with or whether they mean anything or not — shooting match, enchilada, schmear, shebang? "The whole ball of wax" first showed up in the 1880s, though some writers say it comes from a 16th-century ritual for dividing up an estate among heirs. If you believe that, I've got a caboodle I want to sell you.

A number of years ago I started saying "the whole kazonga," just because I liked the sound of it. Nobody ever called me on it, but when I finally looked it up it turned out to be the name both of an Italian adult comic book and of a Zambian minister who was involved in a fertilizer scam. In the somewhat unlikely event that "the whole kazonga" ever catches on, you can be sure someone will explain how it originally comes from one or the other of those.

Still, it's hard to accept that it doesn't matter where the expression came from. Whether the measure is six yards or nine, it has a tantalizing specificity. It cries out for an explanation, and there are plenty of them at hand. Is it merely coincidence that six yards is the exact diameter of a pitcher's mound? The amount of cloth in a Varanasi sari? The length of a parachute line?

But that profusion of possibilities is the key to the idiom's appeal. If "the whole nine yards" had a definitive completion — if it went on to mention yards of cloth, cement or ammunition — it would never have caught on in the first place. It's like a line of poetry; it resonates without resolving.

Except that we don't think of this as poetry. A poet's images can bubble straight up out of the imagination; we don't ask for explanations or backstories. Would it really help to know where Gertrude Stein got "pigeons in the grass, alas" from? "Let me see, that was the day when Miss Stein and I were walking in the Luxembourg Gardens, and I started to sit on the lawn but she said, 'No, Alice' ... "

But that's just the kind of story we expect when the phrase originates in the collective imagination. So we rummage around in old ships and cement trucks looking for a secret key, as if there couldn't be any poetry in everyday language that didn't begin its life as prose.