by Ed Simon
Bad poetry can tell us as much about the art of writing verse as can good poetry. Much can be learned by close reading poetry, which is well written, that has withstood the test of time or for which there is a general critical consensus regarding excellence in terms of technique or influence, impact or experimentation. By reading bad poetry, however, the critic can analyze the multitude of things that can go wrong in verse, the awkward turn of phrase, the strained rhythm and meter, the convoluted rhyme, the tortured metaphor, or the inappropriate image. There is a temptation to understand bad poetry in terms of a variation of Tolstoy’s contention about unhappy families, for there are as many ways to pen a bad lyric as there are ways to write one. Of course, the vast majority of verse ever written hasn’t been good, much less great, though it would be hard to gauge what percentage is truly bad (it might not be unfair to presume that most of it is, though thankfully the bulk of that is inaccessible to the average reader, hidden away in Moleskin or silicon). Most of us have little to gain in reading such work, much less in penning a hatchet job about their (lack of) merits. Which is to say that to close read the sophomore effort as a means to denigrate a poetic attempt is neither pedagogically or ethically sound, but there are some published poems, written in such unthinking and foolish pomposity, that we do gain knowledge by considering them.
Consider the nineteenth-century versifier Julie A. Moore, whom Britanica informs us was an author of “maudlin, often unintentionally hilarious poetry” that was “parodied by many.” Moore falls into a common pitfall of the bad poet, which is to valorize the strictures of form beyond anything else. When an idol is made of structure, you can inadvertently end up with lines like “’Lord Byron’ was an Englishman/A poet I believe, /His first works in old England/Was poorly received./Perhaps it was ‘Lord Byron’s’ fault/And perhaps it was not. His life was full of misfortunes,/Ah, strange was his lot.” Even after we get past the ungrammatical construction in the second-line, and the garbled meter, Moore’s poem about Byron sacrifices syntactic sense in favor of maintaining her plodding rhyming couplets. It’s not that the rhyme scheme itself is bad – after all, John Dryden and Alexander Pope made great use of the same rhyme scheme – but that here it’s a Procrustean bed hacking at meaning rather than limbs. Why does Moore write that Byron was a “poet I believe?” The speaker presumably knows that Byron is indeed a poet, and the verse itself appears allergic to any kind of ironic interpretation. Why the quotation marks around “Lord Byron?” What was “strange” about his lot – we’ve been given no indication. What’s conveyed isn’t mystery or ambiguity, but mere befuddlement, and not on the part of the reader but rather of the poet.
Solyman Brown, a nineteenth-century American dentist, founder of the U.S. National Dental Society and dubious Poet Laurette of his profession, is another example of an author whose reach exceeds his grasp, even if that subject is teeth. Subject matter, it should be said, is not necessarily what makes a poem bad, and there is no reason why lyrics about dentistry couldn’t necessarily be good (a difficult subject but not an impossible one), but Brown’s Dentologia, a Poem on the Diseases of the Teeth and Their Proper Remedies is not that book. In an excerpt included in D.B. Wyndham Lewis’ classic 1930 compendium The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, Brown gushes that “Whene’er along the ivory disks are seen/The rapid traces of the dark gangrene,/When carries comes, with stealthy pace, to throw/Corrosive ink-spots on those banks of snow,/Brook no delay, ye trembling, suffering Fair,/But fly for refuge to the Dentist’s care.” By comparison, Moore’s poem is merely amateurish, but Brown’s is an opus of terribleness. Again, we have the steadfast adherence to rhyme, for often the bad poet imagines that formal affectation is enough to elevate tone-deaf works to the realm of the good. Behind that, though, Browne delivers poetic effects so incompetently that they’re impressive. The forced metaphors are central to this, such as Brown’s description of teeth as “ivory disks” and “banks of snow,” the stain of dental disease as “Corrosive ink-spots.” What exactly is the image being conveyed in the first example, for what is disk-like about teeth (unless his patients had strangely rounded incisors?). For that matter, why the mixture of ink and snow, an incongruous image if not quite a mixed metaphor, while one wonders what type of ink is corrosive? This is not, of course, to even mention the melodrama of the poem, in which the language is obviously incommensurate with the subject, the adjectives “trembling, suffering,” the invocation to “fly for refuge to the Dentist’s care.” That all of this is hilarious goes without saying.
The greatest of terrible poets is commonly taken to be the Victorian Scotsman William McGonagall, whose truly atrocious verse hasn’t earned him a spot on Parnassus but certainly is worth remembering in its own way. Infamously narcissistic, and oblivious to his own poetic deficiencies, McGonagall penned stunning works, in a sense. Memorializing the Tay Bridge Disaster of 1879 whereby a Dundee bridge collapse caused a locomotive to plummet into the river below, McGonagall wrote “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.” Compared to McGonagall, Moore might as well be Dante, Brown could be Milton. As with the Brown poem, McGonagall’s attempt is unintentionally hilarious, and often for the same reasons, albeit those who perished in the disaster recounted would have probably wished for a more fitting poetic memorial. “The Tay Bridge Disaster” is a morass of missed beats and fumbled rhymes (such as when “away” is rhymed with “day,” but several feet too soon). As with Brown, McGonagall is guilty of antique affectations, as with his copious use of elision, whereby proper meter is maintained by shortening words with an apostrophe. The Scotsman uses it across his poetry to scattershot purpose, unnecessary adornments that often do the opposite of what he intended, while the use of elision was already unfashionable by the late nineteenth-century. Then, clearly, there is that final line, which isn’t understatement so much as mute literalness. “The Tay Bridge Disaster” is clearly not Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”
Formulating a grand unified theory of bad poetry is difficult to do because, as with anything literary, it’s so easy to derive counterexamples. Adept poets often break meter or rhyme, sometimes to powerful effect. Fumbled formal constraints are obviously a mark of the amateur, but formal structures themselves are the very bones of poetic history, for we wouldn’t abandon villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets just because McGonagall didn’t know what he was doing. Faux archaism is frequently the mark of a particularly self-serious kind of poet, but there are definitely examples of antiquated language being used in a powerful manner, such as the blank verse drama of playwright Mike Bartlett. If pretentiousness was all it took to dismiss a poet, then the Romantics and Beats would all be scrapped, and though William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac sometimes wrote bad verse, they often wrote great verse as well, self-serious though it may have been. A surfeit of emotion might be embarrassing and frequently leads to bad verse (here I’m thinking of Oscar Wilde’s quip that “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling”), but it can also produce Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” where even the exclamation marks that are so cringey in a McGonagall are capable of taking on a sublime caste. I would venture though that every bad poem embodies at least one of those qualities (there are also definitely others, per the adapted Tolstoy sentiment in my introduction). Arguably the biggest marker of bad poetry is the same as that of any bad writing – it simply doesn’t do what the poet wants it to do.
For a contemporary poem that encompasses all of these markers of badness – incompetent formalism, faux archaism, pretension and grandiosity, and an overabundance of unwarranted feeling – read Joseph Charles MacKenzie’s 2017 “Inaugural Poem for Donald J. Trump.” An unofficial occasional verse by this fellow of the Society for Classical Poets, the poem wasn’t actually read for Trump, because the president elect apparently doesn’t broach the presence of a Maya Angelou, Richard Blanco, Elizabeth Alexander, or Robert Frost at President his inauguration in either 2017 or 2025. MacKenzie’s thirty verse embodies all of the previously discussed lyrical deficiencies to hilarious result. “Come out for the Domhnall, ye brave men and proud/The scion of Torquil and best of MacLeod!” writes MacKenzie, in reference to the maiden name of Trump’s mother, a Scottish immigrant. Clearly indebted to mid-Scots poetry from Dunbar to Kennedy, MacKenzie’s poem is an example of why faux archaism so often fails, namely because it’s not the fifteenth-century anymore (and that’s not a small detail). While the prerogatives of the close reader and New Critical orthodoxy might demand that works be read by themselves without consideration of the wider context, it’s simply impossible to do so when competently making aesthetic judgements. This isn’t to say that purposefully antiquated styles can’t be used – they could be deployed ironically, or perhaps as part of a fictitious “found document,” or in some other way – but there is absolutely no subtlety in the squawking proclamations of MacKenzie.
“When freedom is threatened by slavery’s chains/And voices are silenced as misery reigns,/We’ll come out for a leader whose courage is true/Whose virtues are solid and long overdue,” writes MacKenzie, and though his proficiency of meter is just better than a McGonagall, his poem owes more to a football cheer than genuine verse. Wilde’s point about extravagance of feeling rendering embarrassing results isn’t always fair, but it certainly is in MacKenzie’s case. The politics of the verse are, to me at least, reprehensible – though T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound both prove that there can be brilliant reactionary verse. Nor is it that a petty politician is unworthy of verse; after all, Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey worked in the court of Henry VIII, and he was a vain, intemperate, and small-minded leader. Rather it’s that MacKenzie’s poem is deeply, deeply funny, all the more so because one imagines that the poet is unaware of it. If you are instead looking for an actually good poem to mark the inauguration, better to turn towards a brilliant work from 1939. “Perfection, or a kind, was what he was after,” writes W.H. Auden, “And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;/He knew human folly like the back of his hand,/And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;/When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laugher,/And when he cried the little children died in the streets.” The title – “Epitaph of a Tyrant,” of course.
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Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily, and Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.
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