'The Bulk of English Poetry Is Bad'

“The bulk of English poetry is bad. This fact cannot be disputed, but any reader who wishes to confirm it by his own observation has only to scrutinise a representative collection of books of verse published over the past six centuries or so.” 

Before you go apoplectic, consider that most poetry written anywhere at any time is bad. The same is true of any art. Talent is always rare, and genius almost nonexistent. In a note at the front of The Worst English Poets (Allan Wingate, 1958), Kenneth Hopkins, using the pseudonym Christopher Adams, suggests we consider the word “representative” and writes:

 

“Chaucer is not representative of medieval poetry, Spenser is not representative of Elizabethan poetry, nor Milton nor Shelley nor Tennyson of the periods in what they lived. These are the peaks, but ‘representative’ poetry must be sought in the foot-fills.”

 

Hopkins (1914-1988) was a British writer and critic who published seven mysteries and crime novels, often using a nom de plume. The Worst English Poets is an anthology  of roughly sixty poems, each accompanied by a brief note by Hopkins. The selection relies heavily on the Victorians, and Hopkins savors a quality G.K. Chesterton called “a rich badness.” I’m not familiar with any of these poets. Here are the opening lines of “A Tragedy,” written by Theo Marzials and published in The Gallery of Pigeons, and Other Poems (1873):

 

“Death!

Plop.

The barges down in the river flop.

Flop, plop.

Above, beneath.

From the slimy branches the grey drips drop,

As they scraggle black on the thin grey sky,

Where the black cloud rack-hackles drizzle and fly

To the oozy waters, that lounge and flop

On the black scrag piles, where the loose cords plop,

As the raw wind whines in the thin tree-top.”

 

Like talent, such exquisite awfulness is rare. You keep reading, waiting for the poet to wink and let us in on the parody. It’s a chilling thought: this guy is serious, as is M’Donald Clarke, author of “A Tarnished Reputation” (Death in Disguise, a Temperance Poem, 1833):

 

“Often, and oftener with his breath

Mixes the steam of moral death,

From which his home in horror shrinks—

Rumour mutters low, ‘he drinks.’”

 

I’m unable to find out much about “J. Pickering,” author of Poetical Miscellany. Pathetical and Consolatory Poems (1830). Hopkins says of this quatrain, “the hero is Providence”:

 

“He makes the bitter sweet, the med’cine food,

And ‘all things work together for our good.’

He knows our frame, and with parental love,

He chides our follies while His bowels move.”

 

Let’s not get too cocky. Condescending to the past is easy. Consider this denatured prose marketed as poetry by the 2022 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Diane Seuss:

 

“There is a poetry of rage and a poetry of hope.

Each fuels the other, looks in the mirror and sees

the other. Or wields the other. Isn’t it funny

to imagine hope, not much more than a toddler,

wielding rage in its fist like a cudgel?”