Even this brief sketch of McGonagall’s reception should be enough to suggest how closely the public circulation of his badness was aligned with the institution and establishment of modern critical orthodoxies. Maybe McGonagall’s poems are indeed bad; maybe we can all agree about that, as Lerner expects. But his canonical badness seems also to have been an artefact of literary pedagogies operating from the 1930s into the 1970s and beyond. However much we may want to find in it a negative touchstone of critical universalism, such exemplary poetic badness has a history.

Bad poetry publishers

Lerner credits ‘Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop – two of the most learned people I’ve ever met’ with introducing him to McGonagall when they gave him ‘an anthology their small press had published called Pegasus Descending, ‘A book of the best bad verse.’’¹ The gift was presumably a copy of the 2003 edition put out by the Waldrops’ cottage publishing house Burning Deck – a name drawn from another notoriously bad poem. The first edition of Pegasus Descending, from 1971, bore a rather different imprint, that of Macmillan, New York.

As Macmillan’s involvement indicates, enterprising publishers saw value in anthologies of bad poetry in the later twentieth century. Many were issued by minor and even samizdat publishers, as with Crad Kilodney’s Charnel House Anthology of Bad Poetry, volume 1 in 1989 and volume 2 in 1992, stapled together and hawked by their compiler on the streets of Toronto. Others, like Macmillan’s Pegasus Descending and Vintage’s 1997 Very Bad Poetry, edited by Kathryn and Ross Petras, were put out by major firms. In the constrained contemporary marketplace for poetry, bad poetry continues to present a potentially lucrative niche for publishers small and large.

McGonagall is included in all the anthologies mentioned above – in Pegasus Descending, edited by James Camp, X.J. Kennedy and Keith Waldrop, and in the Kilodney and Petras anthologies – and in most others that have been published. But his poetry did not appear in the first major modern anthology of bad poetry, The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, edited by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee. The Stuffed Owl was published in 1930 by J.M. Dent, where Lee was a senior editor, and then republished by Dent in an expanded edition in 1948 (and more recently by NYRB Books in 2003). This was the first volume to identify bad poetry as potentially convening an extensive general readership. It was equally an intervention committed to the critical demotion of eminent Victorians. As such, it was broadly oriented by the poetic program of high modernism.

The term anthology traces back to Classical collecting practices – an anthologia was a collection of flowers and, by metaphoric extension, a collection of poems by diverse hands. There is mention in ancient texts of anthologies of bad poetry, as well as good, although no such collection has survived. Catullus 14a complains, for instance, of being given a collection of very bad poems as a joke gift one Saturnalia, and threatens a bad anthology of his own in revenge. But for all such Classical precursors, the key reference points for The Stuffed Owl were those of the much more recent anthologising culture epitomised by Francis Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury, first published in 1861 and much reprinted, revised and expanded into the twentieth century. Lewis and Lee specialised in ‘good Bad verse’, which is to say: bad poems by canonical poets.² Readers are likely to recognise many more of their chosen poets than those who appear in more recent anthologies of bad poetry. William Wordsworth, with 14 poems, is their most featured poet, as he is also, not coincidentally, in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Even their title, The Stuffed Owl, is drawn from a Wordsworth sonnet. And Lewis and Lee’s decanonising choices shadow Palgrave’s canonical selections much more generally, likewise leaning heavily towards the nineteenth century.

Beginning in the 1950s, this modernist reassessment of nineteenth-century poetry entered into new combinations with a commercially globalising British popular culture that retailed humorous eccentricity as one of its specialties. It’s no accident that J.K. Rowling named one of her characters ‘McGonagall’, and an anthology of bad poetry sits comfortably on the shelf today alongside a Monty Python DVD collection and a copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In Douglas Adams’s novel, the unspeakably bad poetry of the extra-terrestrial Vogons is only the third worst in the universe, ‘the very worst poetry of all’ perishing ‘along with its creator Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England in the destruction of the planet Earth’.³ The comic vernacularisation of a series of modernist critical postures takes flight here out into the furthest stretches of the universe. Even aliens agree about bad poems, as if in remarkable confirmation of the self-evidentiary value ascribed to them by Lerner. But this universality remains a print construction. Adams’s novel sits atop a decades-long history of publishing bad poetry anthologies; the laughably universal distaste it stages is still coordinated, however distantly, by critical priorities first developed in the 1920s.

Some poems are not bad

Working out which poems were bad was a priority for the critical revolution instigated by T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and associates and extended across wider institutional settings by the New Criticism and Leavisism. This modern criticism was a project and pedagogy centred on critical discrimination. Unlike historical scholarship, it insisted on evaluative judgement. In the archetypal classroom exercise of Leavisite teachers, for example, students were given two poems on a common theme and called upon to decide which was good (usually Donne) and which was bad (sometimes Wordsworth, more often Percy Shelley): thumbs-up, thumbs-down. But unlike more impressionistic, moralising, sentimental or politicised modes of criticism, modern criticism restricted the factors to take into account when making this judgement to those pertaining directly to the poem at hand. Modern criticism, as Simon During has written of Leavis, was then ‘conceptually presuppositionless’ in its ideal operations; ‘it is immanent in that its criteria of judgment derive (in theory) from its objects’.⁴ Judgements about poems were required to be purely poetic judgements; they were to be framed in poetic terms as coordinated and instantiated in the specific poem under consideration. And so, as the story goes, we learned to do close reading, and so university English became the home of advanced training in critical sensitivity and responsiveness.

On the one hand, identifying bad poetry was awarded the status of a central critical technique. The capacity to understand how good poems worked was cultivated through negative judgements about bad poetry. While historical scholars might skirt around it, judgement was the fundamental task demanded of modern critics. But on the other hand, the parameters for exercising judgement were restricted to intra-poetic events and features. You had to say which poems were bad. But you also had to deduce their badness from within, so to speak. It wasn’t as simple a question as applying an external set of criteria – of rules for good poems – and seeing if the poem failed to meet them. Critical evaluation, proceeding immanently, had to work at a much closer level of engagement with the particularities of the text.

Thanks to the methodological demands being placed on it, bad poetry formed a site of considerable theoretical interest in the 1920s. In writings from Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot to Robert Graves’s ‘What is Bad Poetry’ of 1923 and I.A. Richards’s chapter ‘On Poetic Badness’ in his Principles of Literary Criticism of 1924, we can see new efforts to conceptualise bad poetry as an instrumental critical category. But the attention commanded by bad poetry also marked it out as the site of a stubborn problem. One great advantage of the immanent method was that it promised to secure any final judgement as authoritative. As Robert Graves noted, critical judgement was to be carried out in the absence of ‘any particular literary formula’ or ‘criteria’.⁵ Having instead derived its criteria from its object, a judgement could legitimately lay claim to universal validity. It was, in Graves’s words, ‘absolute’.⁶ But it could with equal reason appear as absolutely uncertain.

When taken to its limit, the requirement of immanent criticism risked destabilising any actual practice of judgement. Judgements were to be supported deductively by principles which themselves were to be sieved from the object at hand. But, seen from another angle, the logical necessity this rerouting of judgement was intended to secure was liable to collapse unto utter contingency. Poems were required, in a sense, to determine their own merits. Yet only critics can judge poems; poems are incapable of judging themselves. Shifting the burden of judgement onto the poem effectively deferred the moment of judgement indefinitely, and so any actual judgement at which the critic arrived could not avoid falling under suspicion of arbitrariness – as resting on nothing strictly internal to the poem under evaluation, but instead on some likely unconsidered conventional opinion on the part of the critic. Modern criticism was then dogged by misgivings: its procedures could seem inevitably casuistic, its determinations never finally definitive.

The complication in the Leavisite classroom exercise, for example, was that while there was always a right answer as far as the instructor was concerned, this answer, from the student’s perspective, appeared indeterminable given strict adherence to purely immanent protocols of critical discrimination. Correctly deciding which poem got the thumbs up and which the thumbs down was then more reliably accomplished by reading one’s instructor rather than the words on the page. That displacement of attention onto the instructor might even be seen as essential to the charismatic dynamics of Leavisite education as a project of subject formation. It was the hidden curriculum in its training of students to be better people by teaching them to be better readers. In 1923, Graves had recognised the issue involved when he declared that ‘in an absolute sense all poetry is of equal value’.⁷ Modern criticism, as characterised in Graves’s early intervention, then kept on running into a problem precisely with the bad poetry that it made central to its critical procedures. And so, for Graves, it was with bad poetry that critical judgements most commonly failed to escape their own unacknowledged contexts. It’s when you judge a poem to be bad, Graves argued, that you’re most likely to be speaking unawares as a member of a restricted community – that is, within a nationally or culturally specific framework, for instance.