AS YOU MIGHT KNOW, we at MISC aren’t reallly big poetry fans. But we’ve just been turned on to a poet we can truly appreciate.

Scottish epic versifier William McGonagall (1825?-1902), whose vast output can be read at the above link, is described on the linked site as “a man without talent who thought he was a great poet and tragedian and only needed an opportunity to prove it.”

His stuff isn’t all that bad really; well maybe largely bad, but not as completely insuffrable as a lot of present-day poesy. For one thing, his poems had stories and at least one-dimensional characters, rather than being limited in scope to the poet’s own viewpoints. A lot of them are about turgid events (shipwrecks, battles, tornadoes, domestic melodramas), instead of the smug flower-gazing of nature poets or the self-aggrandizement of slam poets. His execution of these plots and his verbal stylings might seem less than imaginative by the standards of the classicists, but he remains his own man, with his own inimitable manner.

And his stuff all rhymes too.