‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘shall outlive this powerful rhyme.’ To be a great poet, as the Stratford man knew, is to be immortal. But there’s another way to achieve immortality through verse – and that is the route taken by William McGonagall, the ‘worst poet in history’, who was born 200 years ago this month. His star, I’m pleased to say, shows no sign of fading.
He has, as is only proper, an adjective. You can be Keatsian, Eliotian, Homeric. Or, like most of us when we sit down to write a poem, you can be McGonagallesque. His name is so much a byword for doggerel that a version of him – William Rees-McGonagall – is a Private Eye running joke to this day.
It’s not nothing to be the worst poet in history. God knows, the world has never been undersupplied with bad poets. ‘Tear him for his bad verses!’ yelps the mob in Julius Caesar, cheerfully, on discovering they’ve laid hold of Cinna the poet rather than Cinna the conspirator. To be bad at poetry is to compete in a crowded field. So why of all the millions of bad poets does McGonagall come out on top? Why is it that McGonagall survives and, say, Joseph Gwyer (the potato poet of Penge) languishes in relative obscurity? What is it that makes McGonagall’s badness rather than, say, Stephen Spender’s badness, so captivating?
Bad poetry can tell you something about the good sort. So McGonagall’s work bears serious investigation. There are, I think, two factors to his immortal unsuccess. One is his unfailing tin ear.
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