Memorize poems with Anki

2026-04-06

I often challenge my students to memorize poems. And I have long found Anki to be the most effective tool for memorizing information. However, using Anki to memorize poetry is tricky because it is time-consuming to make good flashcards by hand.

So I created a tool to make good poetry memorization flashcards for Anki. You can find the code at this repository.

This will automatically generate cards that treat each line of the poem as a cloze test. Each card shows the test line within the context of thirteen lines of the poem (a number chosen so that it would work well on phones, but also because thirteen is a good number).

You can make cards directly from Poetry Foundation URLs, or you can make custom cards. See the README for details.