Presented as part of the Literary Studies Seminar Series

Few would dispute the claim that William McGonagall’s ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ is the best bad poem ever written. Yet who now recalls other examples from the once prolific Railway school of poetry? Who remembers the Dairy poets, in particular James McIntyre and his splendid ‘Ode on the Mammoth Cheese’? Indeed, what draws great bad poets so inexorably to themes such as milk products, dentistry and tomatoes? What attracts them at other times so strongly to Disaster? This paper presents a range of famous and lesser-known bad poems, examining the unique combination of subject matter, verse form, metaphor, and affective and linguistic styles instinctively favoured by bad poets. It looks at how bad poetry reveals the characteristics of great poetry, much as the inversion of a photographic negative produces a true likeness. It asks why philosophers write such bad poetry, but is hesitant to give an answer. The paper argues that bad poetry provides a concentrated example of unintended (or accidental) humour and demonstrates that in this cameo form the otherwise wide and untrammelled field of unintended comedic consequences can be examined more closely.

Jan Lloyd-Jones is a Visiting Fellow in SLLL. Her monograph Thomas Hardy and the Comic Muse was published in 2009. Her current project is a book on the figure of the comic clergyman in literature

Image shown: The Poet, Carl Balsgaard (1812-93)