What is Good or Bad Poetry ?

While "good poetry" is generally recognized within a culture, there is a vast gray area of various types of "mediocre poetry", "bad poetry", "good bad poetry", "bad bad poetry", doggerel, jingles, etc. with the boundary between what is considered good or bad varying according to the individual taste of the reader.

Bad poetry is often characterized by some of the following :

1. The poet really intended to write good serious poetry, but had a "tin ear" for the effect of the poem.
   William McGonagal styled himself the Poet Laureate of Scotland, and specialized in long rambling "poems" memorializing national crises, battles, catastrophes, funerals, and events concerning Queen Victoria and her family.
   "The Albion Battleship Calamity"
   

   "Twas in the year of 1898, and on the 21st of June,
   The launching of the Battleship Albion caused a great gloom,
   Amongst the relatives of many persons who were drowned in the River Thames,
   Which their relatives will remember while life remains.
   . . . .
   Her Majesty has sent a message of sympathy to the bereaved ones in distress,
   And the Duke and Duchess of York have sent 25 guineas I must confess.
   And £1000 from the Directors of the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company.
   Which I hope will help to fill the bereaved one's hearts with glee."

2. The mood of the verse does not match the subject of the poem. Wordsworth's "The Thorn" tells the story of a girl who is betrayed by her lover, goes mad, and gives birth to a baby who dies. This tragedy contains the lines :
   

   "You see a little muddy pond
   Of water, never dry,
   I've measured it from side to side:
   'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
   . . . . . .
   Poor Martha! on that woful day
   A cruel, cruel fire, they say,
   Into her bones was sent:
   It dried her body like a cinder,
   And almost turn'd her brain to tinder. . . ."

   
   Crabbe's "Tale of the Elder Brother" tells the story of a man who falls in love with a girl, loses her, and meets her again when she is the kept woman of a rich lawyer (Clutterbuck). Later in the poem she dies, and the man retires to live alone in the family Hall in the country.
   His meeting with his lost love is introduced by the following lines :
   

   "Something one day occurred about a bill
   That was not drawn with true mercantile skill,
   And I was asked and authorised to go
   To seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co." . . . . . . . . Go here for a longer excerpt

3. The poem is trite, overly sentimental, or contains over-worked clichés. Amanda Ross (or Ros - she changed her name so that she could claim kinship to the de Ros family) wrote the following memoriam on the death of her mother :
   

   "The trumpets had sounded
   And the angels shouted, "Come!"
   The Pearly Gates swung open,
   And in walked Mum."

4. The poem contains forced, imprecise, or false rhymes.
   

   "She cried and groaned
   And got no ease,
   Till at last God took pity
   And gave her peace."

   To rhyme, "peace" should be pronounced "peas"
5. Words have been twisted or are in incorrect order to force them to fit the meter.
   Amanda Ross wrote the following after seeing the monuments in Westminster Abbey :
   

   "Holy Moses! Have a look!
   Flesh decayed in every nook!
   Some rare bits of brain lie here
   Mortal loads of beef and beer,
   Everyone bids lost to lust
   . . . . .
   Noble once, these dead folk now,
   Darkness stamped have on their brow.
   All portrays without - within
   Lots of love and shoals of sin.
   Famous some were - yet they died:
   Poets - Statesmen - Rogues beside,
   Kings - Queens, all of them do rot,
   What about them? Now - they're not!."

6. The meter is faulty - the rhythm breaks down.
   Lillian E. Curtis wrote an ode to the Potato, which contains the lines :
   

   "On the whole it is a very plain plant,
   Makes no conspicuous show.
   But the internal appearance is lovely,
   Of the unostentatious Potato."

Humorous poetry may also use some of the above characteristics, but the poet knew what he was doing, and used them intentionally, for humorous effect. Dr. Seuss, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash, and Lewis Carroll are famous for their humorous poetry.

"Algy met a bear.
The bear met Algy.
The bear was bulgy.
The bulge was Algy" . . . (anon.)

 

"Said the big red rooster
To the little brown hen,
"You haven't laid an egg
Since goodness knows when."
Said the little brown hen
To the big red rooster,
"You don't come along
As often as you used to." . . . (anon.)

 

"She frowned and called him Mr.
Because in sport he kr.
And so in spite
That very night
This Mr. kr. sr." . . . (anon.)

 

If Dr. Seuss did techie writing, and Dr. Seuss meets Star Trek - see the InterNet Links for this week

A "Limerick" is a 5-line form popularized by Edward Lear :

"There were two tom cats of Kilkenny,
Who thought there was one cat too many.
So they clawed and they fit
And they scratched and they bit,
Till instead of two cats there weren't any." . . . (anon.)

 

"Nonsense Poetry" is a form of Humorous Poetry. Words may be used correctly, but when put together they are incompatible in meaning. The poet may also use neologisms (new words made up by the poet)

"Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe." . . . . (Lewis Carroll - Jabberwocky)

 

"The elephant is a bonnie bird.
It flits from bough to bough.
It makes its nest in a rhubarb tree
And whistles like a cow." . . . . (I don't know the author of this.)

 

"The common cormorant or shag
Lays eggs inside a paper bag
The reason you will see no doubt
It is to keep the lightning out
But what these unobservant birds
Have never noticed is that herds
Of wandering bears may come with buns
And steal the bags to hold the crumbs." . . . . (Christopher Isherwood)

"Poems Past and Present', J.M. Dent and Sons (Canada) Ltd. fourth printing, 1959

 

"As I was going up the stair,
I met a man, who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today,
Oh, how I wish he'd go away." . . . . (Hughes Means)