There is some competition for the title of worst poet of all time. Two poet laureates of wretched verse are in steep competition. I speak of Julia A. Moore, otherwise known as the Sweet Singer of Michigan, and William McGonagall, otherwise known as the fellow who walked 50 miles to Balmoral to read a poem to Queen Victoria, was turned away unheard, and had to walk all the way back home.
At some later time I shall tackle the considerable specter of Moore, whose horrific verses about local tragedies were so beloved by her contemporary Mark Twain that he based on her one of his greatest comic inventions, the deceased poetess Emmeline Grangerford in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Instead I will discuss McGonagall, which is by no means an easier task. Yet I must. Just as good poets are entreated to read great poetry ("Great writers are great readers," South African playwright and author Zakes Mda once advised), bad poets must also look to their forebears.
Before I tell you any more about him, however, let me take a moment to cite two verses from one of his poems, titled "The Tay Bridge Disaster," so that we all know exactly what I am talking about:
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.
'Twas about seven o'clock at night,
And the wind it blew with all its might,
And the rain came pouring down,
And the dark clods seem'd to frown,
And the Demon of the air seem'd to say--
"I'll blow down the Bridge of Tay."
This who wish to read the whole of it should be warned that it does not end well, for the 90-odd passengers on an Edinburgh train or for McGonagall.
McGonagall was a man of his time, sort of. As a poet who was born in the first half of the Nineteenth century, the sort of pastoral ditties and rhyming tales of catastrophe that he authored were in a style that was then very common. In fact, hundreds of unskilled authors of the era set quill to paper and composed melancholy odes to train wrecks or apple cheeked, fair-haired boys slowly but beautifully dying of consumption and the like while whispering comforting words to their mothers.
It is honestly astounding that McGonagall's verses could somehow rise above the pallid, quavering dreck that surrounded him. However, as the two stanzas above illustrate, McGonagall was uniquely gifted.
To be sure, he wasn't the only poet found it impossible to compose a line that can be scanned properly, but he was especially miserable at it. If we look at the first stanza of "Tay Bridge" as an example, we discover this astounding example of scansion: the first line above has 11 syllables, the next 10, then 10 again, and then a breathless 13, and then, perhaps having overtaxed himself, McGonagall returns to 12.
Further, there is no evidence of any meter whatsoever. Try pounding out the rhythm of that first two abominable lines. We begin pounding along with a rather steady DUM dah dah DUM dah dah waltz rhythm, and then, with the start of line two, we unexpectedly skip into ... what? Dizzy Gillespie couldn't have followed the counterrhythm that starts the next line.
And so it goes throughout the poem, and throughout all of McGonagall's poetry -- every time he seems about to establish a clear metric pace, he sudden goes rhythmically wild. Images of the poet show McGonagall to have been a dour, haggard man, but whenever I read his poems I see the poetic equivalent of Animal from The Muppet Show beating uncontrollably on his drum kit.
Lack of craft is not enough to inspire true greatness. If it were so, every aspiring poet who break a moody sentence in random places might be the next McGonagall. (Although, in fairness, McGonagall's lack of craft exceeded that of most childlike musings, which are merely uninspired in their approach to poetic structure; McGonagall was beastly.)
No, what makes the truly greatly bad is hubris, and McGonagall, dour though he may have looked, had hubris to spare.
Who else, unable to even get his syllables to match up, would nonetheless make extensive use of the poetic technique of "elision," a technique with only one major function -- getting the meter to match up!
Every time McGonagall drops a letter in his poetry and replaces it with an apostrophe -- and he does it constantly, such as with the words "Silv'ry" and "remember'd" -- he has committed an unforgivable act of elision. Obviously unaware of the technique's purpose, he has simply randomly dropped unstressed syllables, and to what end?
My own suspicion is that McGonagall noticed this technique in other poems, thought it looked grand, and so started simply banishing letters from his poetry without ever bothering to discover why anybody would do such a thing. And I can think of no greater act of poetic hubris than this. McGonagall has decided that he is a poet, and a great one, and so he has affected a technique of great poetry, but through his very use of that technique he betrays his lack of understanding of poetry. Magnificent!
And there is no doubt that McGonagall considered himself a great poet. He authored a deluded, impossible-to-read autobiography called The Book of the Lamentation of the Poet McGonagall, which exists only to laud his own contributions to literature.
In fact, the second chapter, after the obligatory "I am Born," is titled "The Genius of Poetry Visits Me." Here is a sample of his bizarre ramblings: " I, their sole surviving and orphan son, by a strange and eclectic natural process have had conserved in my own colossal cranium the best parts of both, the baser instincts having been eliminated by the sheer force of the perverfidum ingenium cotorum which I, though a Milesian on both aides of the house, possess in a much higher degree than that terribly over-praised and far more immoral than immortal Burns........................"
Where McGonagall was headed after all those ellipses is anybody's guess. More anti-Burns rambling? More babbling in pseudo Latin (this roughly translates as "perseverance of an innate quality through" ... what ... "inquiry," maybe?) It is another example of McGonagall's pretensions to greatness that he would suddenly discuss his genius in a language of antiquity, but that he further would simply invent the Latin to do so!
McGonagall avidly sought his notoriety as a poet. He received a small fee -- between a half-pound and a pound -- to travel and recite his poetry across Scotland, and, occasionally, as far south as London.
Audiences delighted in the poet, showing up in droves to make sport of him, and how could they resist? What dull evening would not be brightened by a snippet of bad rhyme, such as these two lines from "The Death of Lord and Lady Dalhousie:" "Alas! Lord and Lady Dalhousie are dead, and buried at last, / Which causes many people to feel a little downcast."
One newspaper report from the time related the indignities McGonagall suffered for his poor art. The story describes McGonagall, dressed in kilt, plaid, sporran, and feathered bonnet, hoarsely shouting his verses while his audience responds by pelting him with eggs, herrings, potatoes, stale bread, an event that culminated in McGonagall drawing a sword and slashing wildly at the air, and then taking a quick bow.
Bad poets must be prepared to make a spectacle of themselves, but they should be duly warned: McGonagall set the bar high. There was his disastrous trip to New York, a city that caused the poet to wax lyrical, saying:
OH mighty City of New York! you are wonderful to behold,
Your buildings are magnificent, the truth be it told,
They were the only things that seemed to arrest my eye,
Because many of them are thirteen storeys high.
However, things were not so mighty (OH!) when McGonagall actually visited the city in 1887, entreated to read by a series of letters that proved to be forged.
Arriving with only eight shillings, he made the rounds of music halls, where he was told, in no uncertain terms, that he would not be able to find an audience. He then set out to sell his poems, but, much to his chagrin, found people would not even read them.
After three weeks, penniless, he wrote home for money, pleading with a friend, "For God's sake, take me home from this second Babylon." He would later write of his adventure, "I love New York, for it made me Love my own land the better."
Alas, like his poetry, McGonagall did not end well. In 1902, after years of writing unhappy letters complaining of "bronchitis, deafness, 'noises in the head', &c.", he died and was buried in a pauper's grave.
But he has left us a comic image of lasting greatness. Who among us can live up to the vision of McGonagall, decked out in ill-fitting Scottish ceremonial regalia, besotted with egg and flour, shouting his fractured verse while waving his sword at a hooting audience? By these standards, most contemporary poetry readings are positively unwatchable.
