Being too much had been part of the act from the start. Bambrick notes that ‘numerous records of his performances in pubs and rented halls always point to the same kind of ‘split personality’ that we have seen in his writing: on one hand McGonagall appears completely serious and sincere while on the other he dresses and performs in ways that hilariously undermine the seriousness of his intentions’.¹ Both his published poetry and his performances were then for Bambrick deeply ironic. His ‘art lies in his ability to speak with two voices: while one voice establishes a naïve perspective, usually in praise of some lofty person or object, the other voice cleverly subverts and undermines the surface meanings with ‘unintended’ information’.² These poems, in other words, satirise high Victorian bourgeois themes and values.

McGonagall’s latest biographer, Norman Watson, similarly positions his creative work in the context of lowlands working-class cultural practices. His turn to poetry in 1877 was motivated, Watson argues, by an economic slump that had drastically devalued McGonagall’s work as a weaver. To an unemployed textile worker with an established line in theatricals, poetry presented a potentially valuable side-hustle. Like Bambrick, Watson entertains the possibility that ‘rather than being an unconscious humorist, he was the master of intentional mistakes and crafted buffoonery’.³ In a speculative vein, he writes that McGonagall’s ‘poetic ineptitude’ may have started as ‘an innocent conceit’ but that it quickly became a ‘deliberately conceived and craftily pursued funding tool’, in which he ‘accepted the irony of an audience ovation or the ridiculing reviewer for what they were: a part of his act’.⁴ You might think this poetry is bad, but given that you’ve paid for the privilege, there’s a sense in which the joke’s on you, which only makes it funnier.

Most recently, Kirstie Blair has read McGonagall in the context of lowlands newspaper poetry columns, in which bad poetry was a well-established practice. In this ‘highly ambiguous and self-conscious culture of bad verse’, Blair writes, ‘the pleasure lay… in the knowledge that a working-class writer who seemed the butt for editorial scorn might secretly be mocking the editor’.⁵ Blair recovers the satirically bad poetry of ‘Poute’, who, never stepping out of character, became a major attraction of the People’s Journal through the 1860s and 70s, when it was Scotland’s best-known popular weekly. As Blair notes, McGonagall could not have been unaware of this peculiar poetic culture, for his poems appeared on the very same pages as Poute’s. McGonagall’s poetic strategy in these circumstances was, like Poute’s, never to step out of character as a naively bad poet; ‘preserving a high level of ambiguity about his motives, and about the question of his self-awareness in producing bad poetry, was in itself highly marketable and attractive to audiences for written and spoken verse in 1870s Dundee’.⁶ What McGonagall thereby created was a body of work in which questions of self-awareness are, in Blair’s estimation, finally ‘unanswerable’.⁷ Was he a bad poet – or a poet who, being in on the game, can’t have been quite so bad after all? Admittedly, to say the badness of McGonagall’s poetry is indeterminable is to say nothing that could not equally be said of every other poem.

For Bambrick, Watson and Blair, it’s been a project of rehabilitation by historical contextualisation. Contesting McGonagall’s canonical badness has involved locating him more precisely in 1870s Dundee. But the more I read around McGonagall, the more I began to wonder if another critical project of recuperation might not also be possible – one that positioned him not in the complexities of lowlands industrial working-class culture in the Victorian period but in those of modernist avant-garde aesthetics. In a marketplace for bad poetry, he retailed poems hinged on the indeterminable ambiguity of their own badness. It’s a strategy not so distant, it seemed to me, from that of Baudelaire’s self-reifications as detailed by Walter Benjamin. Nor did it seem so large a step to travel from McGonagall’s performances to those of Hugo Ball a few decades later at the Cabaret Voltaire. In another direction, the remarkable deadness of his language could appear well-nigh Beckettian, and the McGonagall stone-sucking persona might have stepped from the pages of absurdist literature. McGonagall’s deadpan manner equally anticipated the vernacular modernism of Buster Keaton. As Sarah Balkin has shown, the term ‘deadpan’, naming the maintenance of serious tones, expressions and gestures in the face of ridiculous content, first appeared in 1927.⁸ But McGonagall was deadpan before there was deadpan. There’s an untimely modernist McGonagall, I started to feel, to be set alongside the Victorian working-class poet. But to undertake that project of critical recovery would require engaging with questions beyond those of poetry’s badness – questions, namely, about how poetry works, and what it’s for; about its modalities and affordances; about what makes a good poem; and about why you might want to write or read one.