The idea that the universal validities claimed in literary critical judgements code for contextual prejudices – that they actually designate the privileges and blind spots of a particular critical community rather than anything finally in the texts themselves – is now something of a commonplace. In 1992, Kathy Psomiades noted that in ‘X. J. Kennedy’s An Introduction to Poetry, first published in 1966, and in a sixth edition by 1986, later-nineteenth-century women’s poetry appears prominently in the chapter entitled ‘Evaluating a Poem’ to illustrate what ‘bad’ poetry is, and thus what ‘good’ poetry is not’ (Kennedy, we might recall, also being one of the editors of Pegasus Descending, in which women poets again featured heavily).¹ Poems held up for exemplary badness are so often nineteenth-century poems by women. This is for Psomiades one of the ways in which ‘gender ideology shapes and is shaped by the institutionalization of ‘Culture’’.²

Writing more recently for Meanjin, Alison Whittaker noted how in poetry workshops she often heard ‘the jargon-riddled echoes of ‘bad poetry’’:

Gendered parries spring up in its place – ‘prosaic’, ‘shallow’, ‘flat’ – which treat women’s writing like a cynical pulp cash-grab, or insipid self-maintenance. The racialised blows land heavier, no less patronising but certainly more accusatory – ‘opaque’, ‘didactic’, ‘plain(tive)’, ‘self-righteous’. These are all things underpinning judgements of technique, or even subtly informing those judgements – the original ‘bad poetry’, weighted deeply by our perceptions of its authors and objects.³

For Whittaker, bad poetry is a critical mechanism that has served systematically to devalue Aboriginal women’s poetry. Her response is to identify with poetic badness: ‘I’ve written nothing else. A woman wails’. As such interventions make clear, bad poetry has often functioned since its modern critical conceptualisation as a racialised and gendered principle of evaluation. Whittaker further opens the possibility of poetic strategies that, through identifying with badness, effect a dialectical neutralisation of its exclusionary operations. Such strategies mobilise the oscillating undecidability of bad poetry which troubled modern criticism, where it demanded judgements that were at once absolute and absolutely unsupported. Any bad poem could become good, Graves argued, and vice versa, for ‘in an aesthetic sense the term ‘bad’ is in effect only relative’.⁴
The indeterminability effected by this immanently absolute relativising of value is something you can test for yourself. Recite, say, Wordsworth’s 1827 ‘Stuffed Owl’ sonnet – the titular bad poem of Lewis and Lee’s 1930 anthology – to a friend who has no interest in nor significant experience of verse, someone who claims to know nothing about it. That friend might even be you yourself. I wager you and your friend will concur: this poem might be very, very bad, but it might just as easily be not bad at all:

While Anna's peers and early playmates tread,
In freedom, mountain-turf and river’s marge;
Or float with music in the festal barge;
Rein the proud steed, or through the dance are led;
Her doom it is to press a weary bed – 
Till oft her guardian Angel, to some charge
More urgent called, will stretch his wings at large,
And friends too rarely prop the languid head.
Yet, helped by Genius – untired comforter,
The presence even of a stuffed Owl for her
Can cheat the time; sending her fancy out
To ivied castles and to moonlight skies,
Though he can neither stir a plume, nor shout;
Nor veil, with restless film, his staring eyes.

Stuffed owl, stuffed poem

For as long as anyone can remember, poets have been writing poems about bad poems. Horace’s ars poetica is in large part a list of what not to do – a dos and don’ts in verse which, more often than not, lays the emphasis on the don’ts. To the poets who followed Horace, the most appropriate response to bad poems was usually to satirise them. The great masterwork in this Western tradition is surely Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad, which explores in shimmering detail how much other poets suck.

Around 1800, however, a new relationship was forged between good and bad poetry. If no poet was parodied as often in the nineteenth century as Wordsworth, it was because Wordsworth’s trademark visionary dullness was already so far on the way to being its own parody. No poem is immune to being read parodically, and so turned into a bad version of itself: all you have to do is put on a silly voice. But with Wordsworth, poems began homeopathically to anticipate their inescapable potential badness, and in so doing to open up a space of critical indeterminability available for strange suspensions of judgement. Wordsworth’s ‘stuffed Owl’ sonnet is a poem that outlines this predicament – that every poem exists under sufferance of its badness – as well as the poetic strategy Wordsworth developed in response. For badness looms within this poem like a stuffed owl, which, whatever other meanings it might carry here, also signifies the poem itself. Like the owl, the poem is a vehicle of imaginative transport and a consolatory vector of affective detachments. And like the owl, the poem notably fails to take flight. When Lewis and Lee titled their bad poetry anthology after this poem, they accurately identified it as a poem verging on Wordsworthian self-parody. They thought this made it a bad poem. It could be claimed with equal justice as what makes it a good one.

The poem’s opening sentence takes in the octave, or first 8 lines, across two contrasting quatrains. In the first, the finer strains of a better poetry can be heard in the ‘floating music’ that accompanies the ‘festal barge’ – a nod here to Enobarbus in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra – and in the verse feet that trip to the ‘marge’ of the line. In the second quatrain, we are told that ‘Anna’s ‘doom’, by contrast, is ‘to press a weary bed’: an image that overlays physical incapacitation with dismal publication, the sheets of the sickbed with those of print culture. It’s not just Anna’s doom, it’s Wordsworth’s too: the endless pressing of indistinguishable sad lyric poems that befalls the artwork in the sickroom of mechanical reproduction.

When the poem turns in its concluding sestet to the owl, this transitional object doesn’t so much break with the references to poetry, writing and print that have preceded it as effect a much more dialectical transformation. Although the poem’s mention of ‘presence’ may summon a sense of consolatory gifts, Wordsworth’s owl is not the kind of stuffed toy one would typically give to a sick child today. It’s no plush felt owl from Gund or Hasbro, but an actual owl, taxidermied – an animal that might once have really flown across ‘moonlight skies’ to ‘ivied castles’, but which now, dead, overlooks a possibly dying child. Owls, of course, are traditionally omens of death. Itself dead, this owl signifies death twice over, so to speak – death raised to a second order, in a higher potentiation of the poem’s gothic creepiness. It is a bird that has been turned into a sign for itself, translated into the realm of appearance as a lifeless object of display, an icon of incapacitated aesthetic detachment.

In a later comment on this poem, Wordsworth described the owl as ‘the inanimate object on which this Sonnet turns’.⁵ His phrase associates the owl with the volta or turn of sonnet form, lyric poetry’s best-known and most mechanical trick: the perspectival and conceptual switch that gets thrown, in Petrarchan sonnets like this one, between octave and sestet. In this instance, the throwing of the switch feels particularly mechanical. For one thing, the poem employs a French variant of sonnet rhyme-scheme which, while still formally sanctioned, is in English poetry quite unusual, and which places an isolated couplet, disconnected from all the other rhyming words, at lines 8 and 9. For another thing, the rhyme Wordsworth employs precisely here – ‘comforter’ / ‘Owl for her’ – involves polysyllabic ‘feminine’ rhyming that is traditionally associated in English poetics with comic effects. The distinction will be heard clearly if this rhyme is compared to the others in the poem, which are all strong, ‘masculine’, single-syllable rhymes. Where you might expect a snappy volta, then, Wordsworth instead provides this grinding, drawn-out transition. The owl, the inanimate object on which this sonnet turns, is as dead as the sonnet form, as dead as the sentimental lyric – its fabric worn so thin you feel every bathetic bump.