Because this girl is in a Wordsworth poem, it’s reasonable to expect she’s going to die. In isolating her and severing her from her relations, her sickness already anticipates her ever-so-poetic death. Her forced immobility is doubled in the owl’s frozen reifications. Her exclusion from larger and more joyful poetic scenes likewise extends into the owl’s muteness, which is presented in terms that expressly take in writing as well as speech: ‘he can neither stir a plume, nor shout’. In the octave, the poem contrasts good poetry (Shakespeare etc) with bad (the weary press). But the owl figures a kind of writing that is not writing and a speech that never breaks silence. Poetry would even be incapable of doing nothing here – as if the poem were gesturing towards an unwritable and unspeakable poetry for which success would be as meaningless as failure. In the owl’s ‘staring eyes’ we see the eyes of a poetry that cannot turn away from its own badness, but which, in being forced to look its badness blankly in the face, somehow affords a negative testimony of forgotten pleasures amidst forgotten sufferings. ‘Restless film’, a telling phrase, imagines the lid of the eye as a mobile surface that, in veiling vision, allows us to block things out, to not see them; it sees in that capacity not to see a sign of life. The owl’s glass eyes, by contrast, in which the fixed stare of terror is indistinguishable from the soft gaze of consolation, lie open to it all.

All poems are bad

This, briefly, is Lerner’s position in The Hatred of Poetry.

Disciplinary reflections

At some not very unconscious level I must feel aggression or resentment towards the discipline in which I work, for the typo I commit most frequently is ‘literary shitory’. It’s definitely a Freudian slip of the finger because every time I type it – mistype it – it appears to fit better in context than the literary history I had meant to write. Here I am, I think to myself, squeezing out another exercise in literary shitory, another squalid little contribution to the field. Surely there are better things to be doing with my life?

Andrew Hobbs has calculated that around five million original poems were published by English provincial periodicals in the nineteenth century.¹ If we also took into account poems published in London periodicals, poems published in books, and poems published in the larger Anglosphere, millions more would need to be added to this tally. Of these many millions, I’ve read a few thousand at most. But even this vanishingly thin sample of nineteenth-century poetry in English is sufficient for me to predict with confidence that the great majority of those millions of poems are very bad indeed. Literary shitory is the name of the discipline that investigates the composition, qualities and dynamics of this immense accumulation of bad verse. It sets out to chart the bad poetry of the past in its totality, its oceanic expanses of valueless literary dross.

The question of how best to address literary production considered at these scales has in recent decades usually been answered by researchers advocating computational methods and data scientific approaches. Literary shitory missed the computational turn. It remains committed to the task of reading the innumerable and relentlessly bad entries in its archive one by one. The methodological principle dictating this infinitely deadening reading, poem by bad poem, is one familiar from the study of good poems. It is the principle that every poem is singular, and that its interpretation must in consequence be keyed closely to its textual particularities. For literary shitory, just because a poem is bad doesn’t make it any less unique. More than being just casually unavoidable, reading bad poetry, closely and extensively, is here elevated into a disciplinary imperative.

Literary shitory is a nightmarishly pedantic discipline. In its tracing of networks and cultures of bad poetry, it resembles parodies of massively futile and misdirected scholarship from the notes to Pope’s Dunciad to George Eliot’s key to all mythologies. Still, its Dryasdust practices may well prove indispensable for any critical school that wishes to address the ways in which, in John Berger’s words, ‘the art of any period tends to serve the ideological interests of the ruling class’.² For Berger – writing here not about poetry but about the Western tradition of oil painting – that tradition, when considered in material terms, ‘consisted of many hundreds of thousands of canvases and easel pictures distributed throughout Europe’, almost all of which – ‘average’ and ‘third-rate works’ – go unmentioned by art historians.³ Berger’s claim is that it was precisely through these hundreds of thousands of unmentionably bad paintings that Western art exercised its most powerful ideological effect – namely, that of making the world appear as an immense collection of commodities. What equivalently forceful ideological phantasmagorias were constructed in that epoch of bad poetry, the nineteenth century? Might it in fact have been the bad poets who were the most powerful if unacknowledged legislators of the world?

Writing recently in the Kolkata Telegraph, the historian Ramachandra Guha discusses a poem on the Partition from 1947 that he found in the papers of Sir Francis Tuker, General Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the British Indian Army’s Eastern Command when Bengal was being divided at the end of the British raj. Guha confesses to knowing very little about poetry, but is confident nonetheless in declaring this poem, by an obscure district officer in Bareilly, to be ‘a very poor poem indeed’.⁴ Other readers are unlikely to come to a different judgement:

Just listen to the handicaps
I have to labour under, chaps!
Whene’er there’s trouble in the offing
I seem to get attacks of coughing.
If there’s a riot in my area,
Why then I’m sure to get malaria;
And when some Muslim seeks the blood
Of Hindus all because some sod
Has gone and tweaked the old boy’s beaver
I’m sure to get a bout of fever;
And when there’s stabbing in the city
I get such pains in my dicky;
No sooner Night resounds with howls,
I get a gripping in my bowels.

A terrible poem, says Guha, and yet for all its faults it ‘captures, more vividly than any memoir, novel or historical work I have seen, what it was like to be a guardian of law and order in that blazing hot summer of 1947’.⁵ With unerring precision, it transmits the carping voice of British imperial middle management, for whom administering the violence of postcolonial transition was tropically equivalent to a case of the squirts. ‘Bad poems by bad poets’, Guha concludes, ‘can sometimes tell us more than the finest works of history’.⁶ Perhaps they can even tell us more about history than good poems, for they are more likely to have helped make it. What student of literary shitory, reading of the gripping in this district officer’s bowels, would disagree?

No poem is bad

Not everyone thinks that McGonagall is the world’s worst poet. To date, those who have questioned this critical orthodoxy most compellingly have done so by paying closer attention to the world in and for which he wrote.

In an important 1992 study, Gord Bambrick described how McGonagall had supplemented his income as a hand-loom weaver with regular theatrical performances for two decades before turning from 1877 to poetry. A contemporary notice remarked of McGonagall’s signature acting style that he played the title role of Macbeth ‘in a matter more like a farce than a tragedy’ and, refusing to die in Act 5, instead wrestled McDuff to the ground.⁷ When he extended his repertoire from 1877 to include his own compositions alongside the celebrated speeches of Shakespeare, McGonagall’s mode of theatrical performance remained otherwise unchanged. A contemporary, William Power, recalled that McGonagall appeared in

a Highland dress of Rob Roy tartan and boy’s size. After reciting some of his own poems, to an accompaniment of whistles and cat-calls, the Bard armed himself with a most dangerous-looking broadsword, and strode up and down the platform, declaiming ‘Clarence’s Dream’ and ‘Give me another horse – Bind up my wounds’. His voice rose to a howl. He thrust and slashed at imaginary foes. A shower of apples and oranges fell on the platform. Almost before they touched it, they were met by the fell edge of McGonagall’s claymore and cut to pieces. The Bard was beaded with perspiration and orange juice. The audience yelled with delight; McGonagall yelled louder still, with a fury which I fancy was not wholly feigned. It was like a squalid travesty of the wildest scenes of Don Quixote and Orlando Furioso. I left the hall early, saddened and disgusted.⁸

It seems for Power to have been an encounter with a character lying somewhere between the ancient mariner and Bon Scott.