Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics

Nothing to do with [Sorcery!](/content/sorcery "Sorcery!"/index.html) today – instead, we’re really excited to be finally able to announce...

Poems By Heart from Penguin Classics is an app for iPhone and iPad that we designed and developed for Penguin Classics in the US.

Before high-piled books...

The app aims to help you learn poems by presenting a simple but more-ish game, in which words are removed, one line at a time, and you have to put the right ones back in, against the clock. As the difficulty level goes up, more words are taken out until eventually you’ll have to rebuild the entire line of the poem from memory.

A thousand thousand slimy things...

It’s a simple mechanic but one with some subtleties that we discovered during our prototyping process. Filling in the right gaps quickly becomes more than just a matter of memory – quite often we found we could deduce the right word to use as well. The “gaps” in the poems are represented by marks showing the stresses in the missing word, and the mixture of real words and red herrings suggested by the app can give you a clue as to what’s coming up.

And of course, if you know some of the line, you can use the internal rhymes and the poem’s rhythm to figure out which of the possible words would fit best.

So the more we tested, the more we found we were actually thinking about and discovering the elements that made up the poem – the sense, but also the rhythm and the metaphor scheme – as we played. Getting a really high score means filling a line in seriously fast, so the more you understand the poem, the more confident you feel.

We got lucky here, stumbling on a game mechanic that makes you think a bit like a poet; once we spotted that, we iterated like hell to bring that sense to the fore. (And in the process, all of us at inkle have learnt twelve or so poems entirely by accident.)

Hear, O Hear!

To help you remember the line and understand the sense, the app includes two audio recordings of each poem, synced up to the poem’s text. But the main goal of the app is to enable you to recite the poem for yourself, so once you think you’ve got it down you can attempt a reading from memory for yourself. The result is recorded and synced up with the poem text – so over time, the app changes from a set of recordings to a set of your recordings.

You can email your recitals to people, too, and share them on social networks via SoundCloud (which, incidentally, has an awesome developer API).

Thou art more lovely...

The app is released April 4th in time for National Poetry month in the US and it’s free with two poems: Shakespeare’s Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? and William Blake’s Eternity. Another 22 poems can be downloaded in seven bundles, including all seven parts of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (a total must for Douglas Adams fans).

Look upon my works, ye mighty...

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I use the app on my iPad mini 2 but I can't get the audio to work.. Any trouble shooting tips? (I have checked the volume on my device...)

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E

Hello poems are not downloading, tried reinstalling App etc. It just says downloading nothing is happening. Love the app when it works! thanks

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Hi Ethan - I'm really sorry but Penguin is having some server downtime. We hope the problem will be resolved very soon!

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The Penguin app is great, and this film is cool -- BUT the film is mega-misleading. Sure, the app is free, but then you need to pay 99 cents a pop for new poems. Still worth it, in my mind, but free? Not

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Hi, I am using the Australia itunes store, and using an iphone 6. have tried to buy the in-app Volume 1 but all the poems just say "Downloading" without any seeming to be actually downloaded. Can you recommend how to rectify this problem?

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Apologies for this! Penguin is currently having some server downtime, and hope to have the problem resolved within a few days.

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Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the very prompt feedback, much appreciated.

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R

This would be great if you could upload any text you wanted to memorize. I'd prefer to memorize Bible Psalms and some of my own writings.

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ES

This looks pretty cool -- I look forward to trying it out.

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P

Or in other countries? This is U.S. only, right?

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J

No, this will be available worldwide! (The screenshot happens to be from the US store).

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P

Alright, I see it's not released yet.

I got a strange Itunes error message about it being unavailable in the Swedish store but available in the U.S. store. "Do you want to change store?" Yes, I do! Oops, sorry! Unavailable in the U.S. too, as it turns out.

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J

Yes, it's due on April 4th!

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G

Wow, what a a great idea. Do you know if they're going to release on other platforms too?

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