>>25203726
hard to answer without knowing what kind of books appeal to you. beside a couple of poems, i memorised a passage from donne's sermon LXVI once (not religious, just love that era of english prose). its rhythmic flow and dramatic imagery and gradual rising development made it stick fast in my mind, and as i walked to work i could amuse myself by imagining standing on the street corner and preaching to the passers by in thunderous tones. so... perhaps check out the sermons of john donne?

>>25203739
here's the passage btw:
>Let me wither and wear out mine age in a discomfortable, in an unwholesome, in a penurious prison, and so pay my debts with my bones, and recompense the wastefulness of my youth, with the beggary of mine age; let me wither in a spital under sharp, and foul, and infamous diseases, and so recompense the wantonness of my youth, with that loathsomeness in mine age; yet, if God withdraw not his spiritual blessings, his grace, his patience, if I can call my suffering his doing, my passion his action, all this that is temporal, is but a caterpillar got into one corner of my garden, but a mildew fallen upon one acre of my corn; the body of all, the substance of all is safe, as long as the soul is safe. But when I shall trust to that, which we call a good spirit, and God shall deject, and impoverish, and evacuate that spirit, when I shall rely upon a moral constancy, and God shall shake, and enfeeble, and enervate, destroy and demolish that constancy; when I shall think to refresh myself in the serenity and sweet air of a good conscience, and God shall call up the damps and vapours of hell itself, and spread a cloud of diffidence, and an impenetrable crust of desperation upon my conscience; when health shall fly from me, and I shall lay hold upon riches to succour me, and comfort me in my sickness, and riches shall fly from me, and I shall snatch after favour, and good opinion, to comfort me in my poverty; when even this good opinion shall leave me, and calumnies and misinformations shall prevail against me; when I shall need peace, because there is none but thou, O Lord, that should stand for me, and then shall find, that all the wounds that I have, come from thy hand, all the arrows that stick in me, from thy quiver; when I shall see, that because I have given myself to my corrupt nature, thou hast changed thine; and because I am all evil towards thee, therefore thou hast given over being good towards me; when it comes to this height, that the fever is not in the humours, but in the spirits, that mine enemy is not an imaginary enemy, fortune, nor a transitory enemy, malice in great persons, but a real, and an irresistible, and an inexorable, and an everlasting enemy, the Lord of hosts himself, the Almighty God himself, the Almighty God himself only knows the weight of this affliction, and except he put in that pondus gloriae, that exceeding weight of an eternal glory, with his own hand, into the other scale, we are weighed down, we are swallowed up, irreparably, irrevocably, irrecoverably, irremediably.

>>25203739
Thank you! I wasn't really looking for anything in particular, just things one could consider "culturally" relevant in a broad sense. Recommendations I've gotten up to now include:
>The Torah, Psalms and Proverbs (quite the challenge)
>Dialogues of Plato (will probably just memorise excerpts)
>L'existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism Is a Humanism) by Sartre
>several of Shakespeare's sonnets

I particularly like romanticism and naturalism, and gothic literature is my guilty pleasure. I'd really just learn anything I can though.

>>25203746
That's an interesting piece, both in content and writing. I'm definitely going to learn that one.

>>25203739
Which poems did you memorize?