Incredibly bad poetry that was popular in its day for some reason

Cafe Society
1

(“Its day” meaning, in some part or other of that long and now-dead period of human history when poetry, not set to music, was reckoned an art form, and people sometimes actually memorized famous poems without being forced to.)

E.g., “The Face Upon the Barroom Floor,” by John Henry Titus, which I am familiar with only because it was popular./widely-known enough to inspire a Charlie Chaplin short and a Mad parody, which must have been pretty popular, but why?! Why would anybody ever think this crap was worth reciting?!

2

Are you familiar with the poet William McGonagall ? His most well known work is The Tay Bridge Disaster. Vogons cringe at this stuff!

3

OK, McGonagall seems proper horrible, but what’s so bad about The Face upon the Barroo Floor? The wiki article’s somewhat strangely formatted, it reads easier if properly divided up, but call me a rube, I don’t really see what’s wrong with it… (To be fair, though, I really don’t believe anybody ever considered McGonagall ‘good’.)

4

Incredibly bad poetry was extremely popular in the 19th century. You couldn’t have a public event without a local poet being asked to compose something for the occasion, and major newspapers had a daily poem up into the 20th century. Most of these were on the level of bad greeting card verse, but people wanted to read them.

Some, of course, is simply due to changing standards. People liked the type of poetry in “The Face Upon the Barroom Floor” – essentially a story with a sentimental theme that rhymed. Often they were recited (with dramatic gestures) on stage, which also improved them, must like seeing a performance of a play often gives you more than just reading the text.

Nowadays, people are afraid of sentimentality, so the poems are not well regarded.

5

Can’t forget James McIntyre, the cheese poet. No, I didn’t mean “cheesy”: he wrote most of his poems about cheese.

As with the abovementioned McGonagall, though, it’s unclear how much of McIntyre’s popularity in his lifetime was because anyone actually liked his work and how much because they just liked making fun of it.

Surely this list should include a
Sample work by Henry Wadsworth,
Nineteenth-century “chief singer”,
Lauded, lyrical Longfellow.
I still quite enjoy his poems
(not omitting Hiawatha),
but he’s now a near-forgotten
faded-laurels former legend.

I don’t know if any of Longfellow’s work makes the cut for “incredibly bad”, though. But he has to be about the most stratospherically successful literary lion ever to be almost totally ignored by later generations. He was the first non-British poet (and still the only American one) to have a commemorative bust placed in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, for goodness sake; but can you, off the top of your head, recite more than a line from any of his poems?

6

Martin Farquhar Tupper was the embodiment of this. He was a hugely popular poet in the mid-19th century. And now he’s completely forgotten.

His style could perhaps be described as anti-metaphorical. He took ideas that were obvious and expressed them in an obvious way.

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(off the top of my head)

*Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
'Twas the 18th of April in '75
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day, and year

He said to his friend
If the British march
By land or sea from the town tonight
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light

One if by land
And two if by sea
And I on the opposite shore will be
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm
For the countryfolk to be up and to arm

Then he said goodnight
And with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charleston shore
Just as the moon rose over the bay
Where swinging wide in her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man 'o war
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon, like a prison bar
And a huge black hulk
That was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide…* and the entire rest of this poem, which is just one segment of Longfellow’s Tales from a Wayside Inn.

8

Literary taste is extremely subject to fashion. Not only is some stuff that was once popular or considered good, now forgotten (except by a few scholars) or considered bad, some that was once largely ignored or considered bad, is now considered good. Things will doubtless change again, in unpredictable ways.

9

Well, there’s the lyrics to To Anacreontic In Heaven, which was apparently quite popular…

To ANACREON in Heav’n, where he sat in full Glee,
A few Sons of Harmony sent a Petition,
That He their Inspirer and Patron wou’d be;
When this Answer arriv’d from the JOLLY OLD GRECIAN
"Voice, Fiddle, and Flute,
"No longer be mute,
"I’ll lend you my Name and inspire you to boot,
"And, besides, I’ll instruct you like me, to intwine
"The Myrtle of VENUS with BACCHUS’s Vine.

10

Well, it was a popular drinking song for boozy libertines, at least! :wink: Not sure if song lyrics count.

(And props to SpoilerVirgin—well done!)

11

For truly execrable poetry that was horrendously popular in its day, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Edgar A. Guest. Literary critics of his time lambasted him furiously, but nothing, nothing I tell you, could diminish the affection the general populace had for his verse.

Here’s the first stanza of his most famous work “Home”. (The whole thing’s at the link.)
“It takes a heap o’ livin’ in a house t’ make it home,
A heap o’ sun an’ shadder, an’ ye sometimes have t’ roam
Afore ye really ‘preciate the things ye lef’ behind,
An’ hunger fer ‘em somehow, with ‘em allus on yer mind.
It don’t make any differunce how rich ye get t’ be,
How much yer chairs an’ tables cost, how great yer luxury;
It ain’t home t’ ye, though it be the palace of a king,
Until somehow yer soul is sort o’ wrapped round everything.”

It makes overly melodramatic recitations almost seem like actual verse, doesn’t it?
I’m from Indianapolis, and we have our own dialect poet in James Whitcomb Riley, but he doesn’t go full throttle at it as Mr. Guest did.

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Under a spreading blacksmith tree the village chestnut stands…

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Oh, and mustn’t forget Ella Wheeler Wilcox, some of whose verses are still remembered:

14

Does anyone still read Rod McKuen?

15

Or his soul-mate, Kahlil Gibran. Between the two of them, they destroyed more minds in the late 60s than all the drugs in the world.

16

I hate these threads. I always end up loving a lot of what posters are saying is obvious drivel, and I just end up feeling like a sack of uncultured swine.

17

What?! No!! Loving some bad poetry is one of the great pleasures of life. Heck, you don’t think we have these poets stuck in our heads because of how much we loftily despise them, do you?

Except perhaps for William McGonagall. If you can genuinely love “The Tay Bridge Disaster” then you still might not be a sack of uncultured swine but you probably need some psychiatric help.

[wanders off singing Longfellow’s Psalm of Life to the tune of My Darling Clementine, to get rid of the taste of Tay Bridge]

18

Come sit by me, Nzinga, and we shall all the pleasures of crappy lit’ry taste prove.

19

Ahem.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

For atrocious poetry I give you James Whitcomb Riley, whose home is Indianapolis’s other big tourist trap:

Little Orphant Annie ’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups and saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away,
An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep,
An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’-keep;
An’ all us other children, when the supper things is done,
We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun
A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ’at Annie tells about,
An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gits you
Ef you
Don’t
Watch
Out!

His followers include Edgar Guest, who has been quoted. As Dorothy Parker said, “I’d rather flunk my Wasserman test/ Than read the poetry of Edgar Guest.” The Wasserman test is one for syphillis, which was at that time incurable, and Parker’s assessment puts it at Vogon level, though not as bad as the poetry of Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England.

And then there is the poetry of Miss Emmeline Grangerford, late of Kentucky, which is fairly good, by the standards of 19th-Century memorial poems:

*ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC’D

And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
‘Twas not from sickness’ shots.

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly
By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.*

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WOODMAN, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now.
'Twas my forefather’s hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
Thy axe shall harm it not!

George Pope Morris