The finest collection of truly terrible poetry you could wish for. Clunkers from some surprising quarters, including Wordsworth, Dryden and Tennyson. Hymn-writers give good value: "Oh may thy powerful word | Inspire the feeble worm | To rush into thy kingdom, Lord | And take it as by storm." And how about "Life scums the cream of beauty with Time's spoon" - oh! How true, how very true! And how beautifully put! Open any page at random, and gems like that fall out.

All Good Bad Poetry is formal poetry because the reader is allowed to see exactly how the poem is failing to be good. Strained or unimaginative rhymes and awkward or inappropriately jaunty meters are easy to spot within an open grid of predictability. A formal poem risks bring indisputably bad, for any reader can recognize the ways in which it is bad, whereas free verse may offer a verbal camouflage where one's ineptitude has a fighting chance to remain undetected.

There were bittes of French which, I, alas, poor monoglot that I am, was unable to enjoy.

I think 'Hope kicks the curl'd heads of conspiring stars' by a certain 'Crashaw', is rather good, actually. Substitute the apostrophe for an 'e' and it could be from a modernist poem.

Some of them I found myself laughing out loud at without knowing why, or even thinking they were all that funny, as they were written down on the page. Even more I didn't laugh at at all (especially with some of the 17th century stuff), because the compiler's idea of humour seems principally to revolve around elevated verse on a mundane subject, which is not necessarily side-splitting to us today. I must admit the funniness of a lot of the extracts was lost on me.

I learned that there have been such heroic, if misguided, endeavours as The Dentiad and The Golfiad. Dentists and golfers aren't necessarily the sort of people you'd picture trying their hand at poetry. These days it tends to be reserved for angsty teens and immigrants.

I definitely found that the poems got less funny as the book dragged (sorry to say) on. With most of them I couldn't even tell why they were that bad, either. It seemed, again, to come more from the juxtaposition of the elevated verse and what Lewis and Lee considered inapt subject matter, than the lines themselves.

I didn't at all see what was funny, or even wrong, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Geraldine's Courtship', and while I'll admit the imagery of 'Excelsior', the boy marching through the snow with his banner, blankly braying the same (apparently incorrectly conjugated) word over and over, is absurd, the verse is still good, if not as thrilling as when I was a kid reading I think my grandmother's copy of A Book of Verse for Boys and Girls.

Still reckon this can't be topp'd:

n  When I came to the little rose-colour'd room,
From the curtains out flew a bat.
The window was open: and in the gloom
My love at the window sat.

She sat with her guitar on her knee
But she was not singing a note,
For someone had drawn (ah, who could it be?)
A knife across her throat.n

I hoot every time. That's peak unintentional comedy, the kind you can only get from someone who both a) takes himself completely seriously and b) is completely incompetent. As Oscar Wilde said, 'all bad poetry is sincere.' Btw, I went to a school named after Lytton.

All that said, the book is worth it for the little one or two line snippets at the beginning and end, which had me absolutely rolling. I really wish it would be possible to do this with living poets. I have no doubt that the 20th century alone would easily furnish enough hilariously bad poetry to fill up a volume of equal size.

Also, the humourous subject index taught me more new words than I've learnt in one go since I read Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli.

Illus by Beerbohm. J.M. Dent: London, 1930. 2nd edition, purchased Tavistock, 2004.

Though many bad verses here derive from lesser poets like Dyer, Colley Cibber, M. Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle), Cottle, Dobell and R. Montgomery, big names abound: Cowley, Dryden, Longfellow, Addison, Isaac Watts, even Keats, Browning and Tennyson. Longfellow he faults for a single Latin comparative, “Excelsior.”
Cowley you recall starred in Sam Johnson’s critique of the metaphysicals. Curiously, Abraham opposed Donne’s preferred puns in his "Ode. Of Wit,"
"’Tis not when like words make up one noise;
Jests for Dutch Men, and English Boys."
Oddly, he adds,
"Nor upon all things to obtrude
And force some odd similitude."
“Evidently he considered his own ‘odd similitudes’— very largely drawn, by Donne’s example, from the learned languages of science and religion—conventional comparisons” —quoted from my Ph.D. thesis, This Critical Age, p.76. In “Friendship in Absence,” Cowley’s poem on being separated from his love, he compares their love to stars’ conjunctions, but soon uses classical allusion defending wit:
" ’tis not without Cause that she,
Who fled the God of Wit, was made a tree.”
Or as Marvell has it, “Apollo hunted Daphne so/ Only that she might Laurel grow,” wittily arguing that A desired poetry, the Laurel, not Daphne herself. (My This Critical Age focused on metapoetry in mid-17C England— Cleveland and Marvell, following 16C Berni and DuBellay “Contre Les Petrarquistes.”)
Wyndham Lewis includes Cowley’s “Ode Upon Dr. Harvey,” starting with Nature a virgin, unknown, until Harvey appeared, and Nature
"Began to tremble and to flee,
Took sanctuary, like Daphne, in a tree;
There Daphne’s lover stopt, and thought it much
The very leaves of her to touch,
But Harvey, our Apollo, stops not so,
Into the bark and root he after her did go..

He so exactly does the work survey
As if he hired the workers by the day." (p.25)

Others besides Shelley wrote of the Skylark, like James Hogg,
"Bird of the wilderness,
Blithesome and cumberless." (3)

R.W. Emerson is included, his verse, not essays. His bust features in my U.U Church, New Bedford MA, because he was our interim minister in 1831; he may have learned to reject communion from our own Mary Rotch, who left the service when communion was served. (Forgive making communion sound like a restaurant.) Emerson’s “Efficiency,”
Earth, crowded, cries, “Too many men!”
My counsel is, kill nine in ten,
And bestow the shares of all
On the remnant decimal.
Add their nine lives to this cat.. (165)
Contrast his great poem, “The Titmouse,” (chickadee) where he concludes that a Chickadee saved him, miles from home in a blizzard, its birdtalk very like Caesar’s:
"I, who dreamed not when I came here
to find the antidote of fear
Now hear thee say in Roman key,
Paean! Veni, Vidi, Vici."
(Poems of R.W.Emerson.Walter Scott: London, n.d)

D.B. Wyndham Lewis fully expects a few readers to “dash this volume to the book-shop floor, crying derisively that one might as well pay admission to South Kensington to find the glass cases full of dead mice and little bits of string” (vii). He does not include faults in verse craftsmanship, suggests what makes it bad, “The most obvious tint is bathos: that sudden slip and swoop and slither as down a well-buttered slide”(x).

This collection is kind of fun, but it really is full of some god-awful poetry. It's hard to believe that some of this stuff is for real!

"And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond,
Though but of compass small, and bare
To thirsty suns and parching air.
I've measured it from side to side;
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

- William Wordsworth, 'The Thorn'

wyndham-lewis and lee's 'the stuffed owl' was first published in 1930. i bring this up because it may stand as the first piece of media ever preoccupied with our modern predilection for camp. since there's been art, there have always been those in the audience with a morbid predilection for the outlandish or outrageous. but in the 20th century, that interaction began to adapt to a rapidly swelling media landscape, and mere absurdity became old hat. in its place, critics and commentators began to fixate on failures of vision. awkward oddities, works with visible gulfs between reach and grasp, well-intentioned calamities, and unintentional self-effacements.

this epoch of the post-modern camp spiked with the emergence of celebrity film critics, but didn't reach a white-hot crescendo until the apex of the digital age. now, everyone has a pet farce they can mock and admire in equal measure! 'the stuffed owl' might be chiefly concerned with poetry, but its mixture of sophisticated incredulity and affectionate sympathy is echoed in modern sentiments expressed for such works as 'the room', 'who killed captain alex?', 'birdemic', or 'morbius'. what these editors tapped into... in 1930... was that same spark of teasing fondness born out of the callouses of media oversaturation.

because it's easy to look upon 'the stuffed owl' as something cruel. and, to an extent, it is. but to a much greater extent, the joy one can derive from these excerpts of vexing verse more closely resembles a kind of holistic self-awareness. a "there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-i" type deal. anyone who has ever had a creative impulse in their life has surely winced at something they've done in the past (the very best of my old hip-hop lyrics don't come close to the very worst in this book). we, as empathic animals, admire the impulse to create, even if it flounders as hilariously as many in this book do.

that's why, laugh though we might at a pair of lovers separated by sudden shark attack, or a monk telling rowdy youths to stop dancing on his mother's grave, or the movements of the celestial bodies being honestly conflated with capitalistic commerce (no, seriously), that laughter is tempered by a good, honest sense of pathos.

the verse compiled here are riotously funny, of course. and i annoyed many of my friends with passages (that shark attack, especially). wyndham-lewis and lee have done a great job finding poetry which isn't merely "not good", but a very specific kind of artisanally dreadful. nearly everyone in the book is well-to-do, accomplished, or notable in some capacity. so often their failure to express themselves is a failure to bridge that gulf between intellectualised ideas and the needs of verse. it's a good read if one wants to see the conditions that free verse was allowed to thrive in. game as some of these are, epic stanzas devoted to how steam power will bring about a new Eden on earth are not naturally served by this form.

where the book falls flat is that, since 1930, the public's poetry-savviness has lapsed considerably. speaking for myself, a verse novice, the first half was intermittently quite dull. some entire sections pass by without anything too extreme or riotous to grab the attention, and it's hard to parse the absurdities when our cultural context is so removed. things do pick up, however, in the back end, once the verse becomes freer, and the language more closely resembles our current vernacular.

of particular note is the astonishing index page, worth reading alone for such gems as "Botanist, as mountaineer, inferior to goat, 82", "Planets, mercantile activities of, 72", "manure, adjudged a fit subject for a muse, 91", or "Norns, reboantic, 185". indeed, at the book's most obscure, the modern reader is aided by editorial commentary from the compilers. largely this is comprised of short biographers of each subject, and the conditions their muse failed them. and even if you're clever and don't need the help, their enthusiasm for the material is infectious.

'the stuffed owl' might work better as a reference book, a party favour your bring out to amuse your guests. my having read it cover-to-cover probably wasn't it at its finest. but however long it takes, you should read it in its entirety, whether you like poetry or not. it's one of the earliest and one of the definitive documents in post-irony, the sincere revelry of failed art.

Fun collection of some very awful poetry, by poets both renowned and obscure. If you're a writer, this book is a great ego boost.

I just love this book.

I was directed to it via The Book of Heroic Failures: The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain so was quite pleased indeed when I came across it (and only at $3!)

This is unabashedly bad poetry. The book starts off with a some 1 or 2 line excerpts but it's the longer ones which I enjoy most

An example:

What is liquid - Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

All that doth flow we cannot liquid name,
Or else would fie and water be the same;
But that is liquid which is moist and wet;
Fire that propriety can never get:
Then 'tis not cold that doth the fire put out,
But 'tis the wet that makes it die, no doubt.

A well known collection of bad poetry crossing several centuries. Of note it's not just obscure poets, some entries are from Byron and Tennyson.

I rarely laugh out loud when reading but I couldn't help myself when I read the following bit of absurdity (context: a man is returning to his lover from a sea voyage but impatient he leaps overboard and begins to swim toward the dock when he sees her waiting):

Her fair companions one and all
Rejoicing crowd the strand;
For now her lover swam in call,
And almost touch'd the land.

Then through the white surf did she haste
To clasp her lovely swain;
When, ah! a shark bit through his waist;
His heart's blood dy'd the main!

He shriek'd! his half sprung from the wave,
Streaming with purple gore,
And soon it found a living grave,
And, ah! was seen no more.

("Bryan and Pereene," James Grainger [1721-67])

It reminded me of that scene in "Deep Blue Sea" when the mutant shark leaps out of the water and attacks Samuel L. Jackson. Could the screenwriter have been a Grainger fan?

Here's another verse that takes a decidedly unexpected turn from the pen of the infamous Edward Bulwer-Lytton's son Robert:

I dream'd that I walked in Italy,
When the day was going down,
By a water that silently wander'd by
Thro' an old dim-lighted town,

Till I came to a palace fair to see,
Wide open the windows were.
My love at a window sat; and she
Beckon'd me up the stair....

When I came to the little rose-colour'd room,
From the curtain out flew a bat.
The window was open; and in the gloom
My love at the window sat.

She sat with her guitar on her knee,
But she was not singing a note,
For someone had drawn (ah, who could it be?)
A knife across her throat.