William McGonagall is often considered to be the worst poet of all time. Certainly his work was very, very, very bad - painful in fact - but it is still in print (unlike that of many, even most, better poets). So, here's a humorous testimonial of sorts, and if you want to find out about him, this site is a good place to start, but beware... and if you fancy hearing my dulcet tones, there's an audio version here.
The worst poet
William McGonagall, poet, well sorta,
your words are arranged all bang out of order –
like a lab-rabbit tested with neat Estee Lauder,
they make my skin itch and my eyes start to water.
Your metre’s soon lost and the scan starts to falter,
words reversed they are more often than you oughta,
but not cool like Yoda, it disrupts the aorta
like shrapnel embedded by thesaurus slaughter.
Each time you wrote, accidentally wrought a
work that the reader wishes was shorter,
grating like laughter from Janet Street-Porter,
lines way too long as you pack in all the explanatory details but they really should be trimmed to make them much tauter.
But your canon lives on, and in print, repels boarders,
though you spawned awful verse and always ignored all
attempts to advise, edit or cordon
off what you penned in a cage with a warder.
To allow it free rein risks civil disorder,
more terrible even than Sauron in Mordor,
ironically liked in peculiar quarters,
The Tay Bridge Disaster, read out once floored a
bison, while Pele, in earshot, soon scored a
hat-trick of own-goals, allegedly roared a
‘please make it stop, ref’ as each stanza bored a
hole in the soul of anyone caught a
half-mile or less from where a recorder
in a bunker broadcast Richard Pigott the Forger
til McGonagall’s great-great grand-daughter
killed it with cluster-bombs fired from a mortar.
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