William McGonagall - bad poetry

Subject: BS: William McGonagall
From: The Sandman
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 03:45 AM

William Topaz McGonagall, poet and tragedian of Dundee, has been widely hailed as the writer of the worst poetry in the English language. A self-educated hand loom weaver of Irish descent, he discovered his discordant muse in 1877 and embarked upon a 25 year career as a working poet, delighting and appalling audiences across Scotland and beyond.

His audiences threw rotten fish at him, the authorities banned his performances, and he died a pauper over a century ago. But his books remain in print to this day, and he’s remembered and quoted long after more talented contemporaries have been forgotten.

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: Black belt caterpillar wrestler
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 05:23 AM

There's hope for me yet then!

Robin

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: Donuel
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 05:28 AM

We still remember Keats and others. I feel that a person who tries and fails has more guts than those who do not even try. Anyone remember Walkabout Verse? The most forgotten are the talentless critics.

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: MaJoC the Filk
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 06:43 AM

And behold, Eccles and Bluebottle did discover the works of William McGonagall, and great was their joy on finding that someone had Goon before.

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: The Sandman
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 07:39 AM

Understanding Bad Poetry: The Verse of William Topaz McGonagall
The Society
August 16, 2020
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
24 Comments

by Joseph S. Salemi

The poetic effusions of some people are so incompetent that they cross the line into unexpected humor, and thereby become valuable. Such is the case with the work of William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902), whose poetry has been kept in print long since his demise—first, as a source of amusement to many; and second, as a kind of warning sign to would-be poets concerning the dangers of absurdity and bathos. Not many competent poets have that sort of good luck. McGonagall continues to be remembered, long after better writers have disappeared from public consciousness.

A simple weaver of minimal education, McGonagall was of Irish background, though he lived mostly in Dundee, Scotland. He made up for the paucity of his schooling by self-education through reading, and by vigorous public recitations of Shakespearean passages. He even acted on a few occasions. He was in near poverty much of the time, earning only small amounts of money now and then from weaving, and later supplemented with what little change he could collect from reciting his own verse in taverns and pubs. Only the charity of generous friends kept him and his family from total destitution.

McGonagall was not a bad man. From the few prose accounts that he himself has left of his activities, we get the image of an honest, pious, straightforward character who did not have a malicious bone in his body. He showed genuine respect for his superiors, a strong patriotism, deep gratitude to those who had been kind to him, and an unfailingly hopeful and positive mindset. Reading between the lines of his comments, one can only pity the poor man’s very obvious need for human fellowship, his naïve trust in the good will of others, his shabby appearance, and the actual physical hunger that must have been a chronic affliction. He comes across as a likeable, uncomplicated, down-on-his-luck fellow, always good natured despite his straitened circumstances.

So, what is wrong with his poetry? Why is it derided as the absolute nadir of rotten composition?

In a nutshell, everything is wrong with McGonagall’s poetry. It is so poor that sponsored competitions to produce poetry worse than his have all ended in failure. No one can write worse than McGonagall. When it comes to abominable poetry, he is la crème de la crème. Let’s see if we can understand why.

The first thing to note is the utter, deadpan, blank earnestness of every line the man has written. McGonagall writes the poetry of plain, vapid, literal statement, completely devoid of any sophistication in vocabulary or sentence structure. There are no metaphors, or notable similes. Figures of speech are absent. The only discernible poetic device is rhyme, mostly monosyllabic. Reading McGonagall is analogous to listening to someone with an aphasic disorder trying mightily to speak. Here’s the start of his poem “The Sorrows of the Blind” —



Pity the sorrows of the poor blind,
For they can but little comfort find;
As they walk along the street,
They know not where to put their feet.
They are deprived of that earthly joy
Of seeing either man, woman, or boy;
Sad and lonely through the world they go,
Not knowing a friend from a foe:
Nor the difference betwixt day and night,
For the want of their eyesight…



This driveling doggerel is the very antithesis of poetry. It lacks all life, or any sense of verbal play, or even any human interest. Yes, yes, we all feel sorry for the blind, but these ten lines only evoke ridicule and contempt. They make the reader wish that the blind would slip on banana peels and break their necks. The only thing motivating such awful poetry is a clichéd appeal to emotions, draped in the most pedestrian and hackneyed language. McGonagall does this all the time, and it is purely unconscious. He is blissfully unaware of what the task of language is, and how real poets work to chisel and polish every word and line into razor-sharp precision. Compared to them McGonagall is a cave man, just crudely chipping flints.

Notice also the slovenly rhythm of the lines. Some seem to be pentameter, while others can only be scanned as tetrameter, and in either case the lines lack all grace and smoothness. The only thing that suggests we are reading poetry is the fact that they are arranged as rhyming couplets. There is something so utterly laughable in these lines, so awkward and ungainly, that one fails to respond to them with anything except quizzical dismissal or impatience.

McGonagall rarely keeps to a fixed meter. He never lets any metrical restriction stop the flow of his thoughts or feelings. Here’s a quatrain from his “Annie Marshall the Foundling,” about the rescue of a child from a shipwreck:



The night was tempestuous, most terrific, and pitch dark,
When Matthew Pengelly rescued Annie Marshall from an ill-fated barque,
But her parents were engulfed in the briny deep,
Which caused poor Annie at times to sigh and weep.



I defy anyone to scan those four lines, which contain 14, 18, 12, and 11 syllables, in their respective order. But let’s forget the metrical infelicities. Look at the last line. This is a textbook example of bathos, or “the art of sinking in poetry,” as Alexander Pope famously described the phenomenon. Can you read the line without laughing hysterically at its silliness, its triviality, its purely unnecessary and pleonastic emotionalism? Again, this is something that McGonagall does all the time. Consider these lines, from his poem about an attempted assassination of Queen Victoria:



God prosper long our noble Queen,
And long may she reign!
Maclean he tried to shoot her,
But it was all in vain.

For God He turned the ball aside
Maclean aimed at her head;
And he felt very angry
Because he didn’t shoot her dead.



This last line unintentionally turns the entire story of the attempted murder into a joke. It is pure bathos: the urge to say something lofty and important, but falling into a laughable absurdity instead. Now bathos is not merely a mistake in word choice, or a failure of decorum. When it happens regularly in a poet’s work, it indicates a severe deficiency in perception and an emotional immaturity. This is a major problem with McGonagall. His moral earnestness and his naïve innocence render him incapable of writing with the cool sophistication, detachment, and emotional distance that a professional poet brings to his work. All McGonagall can come up with is patriotism, religion, trivial details, and pathetic pomposity.

This naturally brings us to the question of McGonagall’s subject matter. None of his work is remarkable in this area: he writes some poems of natural description, some of historical incidents, some of love or revenge, some poems of praise, and some obituaries. But McGonagall’s most characteristic poem is the poem of catastrophe or disaster. A quick perusal of his poems shows ten of them: the collapse of a railway bridge (two poems), terrible fires (three poems), the bursting of a dam, a mining accident, the collision of ships, a shipwreck, and a military defeat. Now writing about major catastrophes or disasters is generally a mistake. The poem, right from the start, will have to be weighed down with the natural lamentation and grief that are publicly expressed over the event, and this ties the poet’s hands in composition and invention. Who can forget the tsunami of lousy poems that followed the attack on the World Trade Center?

Why does McGonagall write so many of these poems? Simple. Amateurish poets like these disaster subjects because a tragic incident that causes a great public outcry saves them the trouble of working hard to make a poem compelling and interesting. All you have to do is add to the chorus of weeping and wailing. Your audience is ready-made, your allusions will be public knowledge, your outrage and sorrow will be reflexively accepted, and you won’t be expected to raise any troubling questions or uncertainties. Your sentimental slop will be applauded.

McGonagall’s most famous (and most absurd) catastrophe poem is “The Tay Bridge Disaster,” concerning the collapse of a railroad bridge bearing a full passenger train over the deep river Tay, which killed many persons. I shall quote the poem’s beginning, and its end:



Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time.

…

It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay.
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay.
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.



It’s hard to believe than anyone could have written that concluding couplet with a straight face, but McGonagall’s habit of bathos was deeply ingrained. He never stopped to consider whether a fact or idea or statement was appropriate in poem; he simply assumed that if it was in some way relevant, and if it could be fitted into a rhyme, he should add it.

Like many amateurish poets, McGonagall tended to be lengthy. Bad poets have always disregarded Edgar Allan Poe’s solid advice about the “totality of effect,” and aesthetic brevity, and how these are spoiled by an unnecessarily long poem. Excess length is usually a function of the amateur poet’s need to “get everything in,” like overstuffing a suitcase. The poet’s obsession with factual information or ideological principles overwhelms concise decorum. McGonagall’s poem about the mining disaster is composed of nineteen tedious stanzas, much of it nothing but a rehash of newspaper details. One of his poems about a terrible fire (“The Clepington Catastrophe”) has eighteen stanzas, some of them downright asinine:



Oh, heaven! I must confess it was no joke
To see them struggling in the midst of suffocating smoke,
Each man struggling hard, no doubt, to save his life,
When he thought of his dear children and his wife.

But accidents will happen by land and by sea.
Therefore, to save ourselves from accidents, we needn’t try to flee,
For whatsoever God has ordained will come to pass;
For instance, ye may be killed by a stone or a piece of glass.



The sheer irrelevance and inanity of that last line staggers belief. It indicates an overwhelming cluelessness about poetry, and a tone-deaf ear for what is suitable and what isn’t in literary composition. This is the real problem with McGonagall—not his wretched meter, not his prosaic diction, not his monosyllabic rhyme, not his depressing plainness. No—these things are disabilities, but they are not the primary and radical disability that afflicts the man. What is missing in McGonagall is the gift of eloquence itself, and the total absence of any fierce affection for language, of any appreciation of its panoply of glory and richness. For someone who supposedly loved Shakespeare, he is absolutely untouched by any of Shakespeare’s linguistic genius or rhetorical fire.

I’m told that McGonagall is highly appreciated and studied around the world, especially in East European and Asian countries. Well, these are people who are not native speakers of English. And if they are young they may still harbor the silly notion that poems are primarily about their paraphrased meaning. They may see in McGonagall nothing but his translatable subject matter, and because they are speakers of a classroom-learned English, they don’t see the unintended comedy, the silliness, the glaring incompetence, the sheer banality that an educated native speaker of English who is well trained in our literature cannot miss. The foreigners have an excuse for misreading McGonagall, because simple translation does not pick up the man’s bathos and absurdity.

But let me conclude with a more general observation. McGonagall was a poor and barely educated man. His life was a constant struggle, and he willingly endured heckling audiences who mocked his work and threw decayed vegetables and rotten eggs at him. In fact, his poor poetry may even have been a deliberately chosen signature style that he employed as a way to earn money for his desperate family. He recited his work in taverns and circuses to make a living. He may have had the honorable excuse that his primary duty was to his wife and children, and if this kind of worthless doggerel brought him a meager sustenance, so be it. Let them be amused by me, he may have thought, as long as I get paid.

But what is our excuse? I know far too many persons who share some of McGonagall’s faults. In our century, poetry is merely a private pursuit, an obscure boutique art that brings us neither money nor anything else. We aren’t keeping the wolf from the door with our compositions. For us this is just a hobby or a game. Can we at least resolve that we will NOT commit the poetic crimes that McGonagall committed? Can we stop with the humdrum plainness, the vapid statement, the dull diction, the crappy meter, the tedious length, the triviality, the commonplace thoughts and clichéd perceptions? Above all, can we give up the insufferable earnestness, the tone of which tells the reader that you are either spouting a commercial advertisement, announcing a news item, or giving a Sunday-School sermon? Can we at least TRY to be skilled and detached professionals?

We’re not feeding our families with what we write. We don’t have to amuse disorderly crowds at circuses and pubs. We don’t have to tolerate being pelted with decayed vegetables or hooted at with nasty catcalls. We don’t have to write like McGonagall.

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: gillymor
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 08:48 AM

WAV seemed like a decent guy but he didn't deserve anything more than a participation trophy for his mind-numbingly bland "poetry". He did put up some good photos, though, maybe he should stick with that.

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 11:16 AM

The name comes up so often here I thought for sure there was a thread already. Little Hawk really hammered home McGonagall in various threads over the years, but this Google search shows that a lot of others have as well.

In the US, our equivalent to this guy was Edgar Guest, "The Poet of the People." Guest was pilloried in literature by Sinclair Lewis who created T. Cholmondeley Frink as a character in Babbitt. I place this tidbit here only as breadcrumbs should anyone land on the thread and want to follow up on bad poets.

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: Donuel
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 11:56 AM

I too fear that William McGonagall threads are tied with William
Shakespear threads.

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: Bill D
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 01:48 PM

I have this book..Pegasus Descending
....which has several of McGonagall's poems about the bridge. The first celebrates its construction. The second, "The Newport Railway" is about the rail line which crossed the bridge and made going from Newport to Dundee easier. Then came the famous 'disaster' poem. Finally, the is "An Address to the New Tay Bridge" with its "strong brick tiers and buttresses in so grand array".

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: Bill D
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 01:51 PM

I should have guessed such a *cough* renowned poet would be online.
on the new Tay bridge

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: Rapparee
Date: 25 Jan 24 - 09:08 PM

The United States has several competitors to William McGonagall. My personal favorite is Julia A. Moore, the Sweet Singer of Michigan.   Here is just one of her many poems.

Grand Rapids Cricket Club
    by Julia A Moore

In Grand Rapids is a handsome club,
Of men that cricket play,
As fine a set of skillful men
That can their skill display.
They are the champions of the West,
They think they are quite fine,
They've won a hundred honors well;
It is their most cunning design.

II

Brave Kelso, he's considered great,
Chief of the club he is found;
Great crowds he draws to see him bowl
The ball upon the ground.
And Mr. Follet is very brave,
A lighter player than the rest,
He got struck severe at the fair ground
For which he took a rest.

III

When Mr. Dennis does well play,
His courage is full great,
And accidents to him occur,
But not much, though, of late.
This ball play is a dangerous game,
Brave knights to play it though;
Those boys would be the nation's pride,
If they to war would go.

IV

From Milwaukee their club did come,
With thoughts of skill at play,
But beat they was, and then went home --
Had nothing more to say.
Grand Rapids club that cricket play,
Will soon be known afar,
Much prouder do the members stand,
Like many a noble star.

Subject: RE: BS: William McGonagall
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 26 Jan 24 - 02:29 PM

With poetry being so closely tied to song, I wonder if this should be above the line?

Subject: RE: William McGonagall - bad poetry
From: keberoxu
Date: 26 Jan 24 - 07:11 PM

Well, Bill D's book IS titled Pegasus Descending,
so maybe the descent below the line is appropriate . . .

Subject: RE: William McGonagall - bad poetry
From: meself
Date: 26 Jan 24 - 07:58 PM

That essay by Joseph S. Salemi is packed with more self-satisfied statements of the obvious than anything McGonagall wrote.