The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse

by D.B. Wyndham-Lewis (Editor), Charles Lee (Editor), Billy Collins (Introduction)

The editors of this legendary and hilarious anthology write: "It would seem at a hasty glance that to make an anthology of Bad Verse is on the whole a simple matter . . . On the contrary . . . Bad Verse has its canons, like Good Verse. There is bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse. It has been the constant preoccupation of the compilers to include in this book chiefly good Bad Verse." Here indeed one finds the best of the worst of the greatest poets of the English language, masterpieces of the maladroit by Dryden, Wordsworth, and Keats, among many others, together with an index ("Maiden, feathered, uncontrolled appetites of, 59;. . . Manure, adjudged a fit subject for the Muse, 91") that is itself an inspired work of folly.

Genres: Poetry, Humor, Anthologies, Classics, Fiction, 20th Century, Literature

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Dominic Bevan Wyndham-Lewis FRSL, was a British writer best known for his humorous contributions to newspapers and his biographies. He was educated at Oxford, and prior to serving in the Welch Regiment during World War I, he had intended to pursue a career in the legal profession. But after suffering two bouts of shell shock and one of malaria, he set his sights on journalism.

Following the war, he joined the Daily Express, where he was briefly the newspaper's Literary Editor. In 1919, he was put in charge of the paper's humorous "By the Way" column and adopted the pseudonym "Beachcomber". Then, when, in April 1924, Wyndham-Lewis left to join the Daily Mail, he recommended the better-known J. B. Morton as his successor.

In the mid-1920s, Wyndham-Lewis lived in Paris whilst carrying out historical research. He later wrote several literary biographies, acclaimed for both their spirited subjectivity and their attention to historical detail, taking on subjects ranging from Rabelais and Moliere to Boswell and Habsburg Emperor Charles V.

After returning to Britain in the 1930s, Wyndham-Lewis turned to humorous anthologies, and in 1954 he collaborated with Ronald Searle on The Terror of St Trinian's (under the pen-name 'Timothy Shy'). He also co-authored, with Charles Bennett, the screenplay for the first version of Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much.

Reviews

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Mediocre poetry – of which there is and always will be plenty – merely bores or irritates, but truly bad poetry, or Good Bad Poetry, goes beyond the insipid or the dull and manages to delight us by attaining new depths of dreadfulness.” (p. ii)

Oy vey. I’m not even Jewish and all I could say was “Oy vey, what where they thinking?” This is a collection of Good Bad Poetry that will make you laugh, wince, roll your eyes, and shake your head in disbelief. What makes it even better (or even better at being worse) is that none of this was intended as doggerel. The poems in this anthology are all published works, some by famous poets, and all were intended as serious offerings to a Muse. Which of the Muses?, well take your pick: Polyhymnia was the muse of sacred poetry; Erato of lyric poetry, and Calliope epic poetry. There are pretensions to all of them in this book. “Whatever their subject, the poems in this anthology prove Oscar Wilde’s conviction that all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” (p. iii)

In addition to the poems themselves, the book has two other brilliant ideas: biographical introductions to the poets, and the funniest index you will ever read (e.g.: Woman, useful as protection against lions, 118) The book was first published in 1930, so the humorous introductions have a fairly modern feel, as in “John Armstrong, M.D., a Scottish physician, added...fresh uneasiness to his patients’ normal misgivings by indulging himself in poetry.” (p. 60)

Sometimes the title of the poem alone is enough to make you brace yourself for what is coming, such as Cornelius Whur’s “The Poet Questions the Ant”, or Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s “Insect Affection”.

Sometimes the rhymes are so strained you can almost see the sweat on the poet's brow as he or she grasps for something, anything, that will fit:

I always know what sort of weather
We are going to have,
For Cynthia never wore her feather
When the weather would be bad.
But when the days were warm and bright
Cynthia wore a feather,
Sometimes black and sometimes white,
The colour doesn’t matter whatever.
- Anonymous:

Also by Anonymous:
There we leave her,
There we leave her,
Far from where her swarthy kindred roam,
In the Scarlet Fever
Scarlet Fever,
Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home.

Sometimes the metaphors are strained to the breaking point, as in the Earl of Lytton’s “Love and Sleep”: Her smile was silent as the smile on corpses three hours old.

Or The Duchess of Newcastle’s “The Body: A Fancy”:

The Nerves are France, and Italy, and Spain;
The Liver Britain, the Narrow Sea each Vein;
The Spleen is Aethiopia, wherein
Is bred a people of black and tawny skin;

Or the Duchess’s “A Posset for Nature’s Breakfast”:

Life scums the cream of Beauty with Time’s spoon,
And draws the claret-wine of Blushes soon;
Then boils it in a skillet clean of Youth,
And thicks it well with crumbled bread of Truth;

Sometimes the imagery is so bizarre it could have come from Monty Python. In John Grainger’s poem “Bryan and Pereene” a young man coming home on a ship is so excited to see his true love waiting for him that he can’t wait any longer and jumps overboard to swim to her as she wades in to meet him. Alas, however,

Then through the white surf did she haste
To clasp her lovely swain;
When, ah! A shark bit through his waist;
His heart’s blood dy’d the main.
He shrieked! His half sprung from the wave,
Streaming with purple gore,
And soon it found a living grave,
And, ah! Was seen no more

Even though poetry used to be a common vehicle for expressing feelings, ideas, and concerns, some topics just do not lend themselves to being expressed in rhyme, such as John Dyer’s “Pastoral”, concerning the treatment of diseases in sheep, or Williman Shenson’s “Home Industries First: The Song of Colin, a Discerning Shepherd, Lamenting the State of the Woolen Manufactory.”

There is also Cornelius Whur’s “The Unfortunate Gentleman”, who mistakenly picks the wrong mushrooms and poisons himself and his family:

But in a dark and trying hour
(Man has his days of woe!),
He found in vegetable power
A dreadful, deadly foe!

Or: T. Baker’s “The Death of Huskisson”, about a man run over by a train:

When, by a line-train, in its hasty flight,
Through striving to avoid it, Huskisson
By unforeseen mischance was over-run.
That stroke, alas! Was death in shortest time;
Thus fell the great financier in his prime!
This fatal chance not only caused delay,
But damped the joy that erst had crown’d the day.

Or: Eliza Cook’s encomium, “The Old Arm-Chair”

I love it, I love it; and who shall dare
To chide me for loving that old Arm-chair?
I’ve treasured it long as sainted prize;
I’ve bedewed it with tears, and embalmed it with sighs.
‘Tis bound by a thousand bands to my heart;
Not a tie will break, not a link will start.
Would ye learn the spell? -- a mother sat there;
And a sacred thing is that old Arm-chair.

There is even Samuel Carter’s “Paean” which is, well, a paean to urban sanitation systems:

The sewers gigantic, like multiplied veins,
Beneath the whole city their windings unfold,
Disgorging the source of plagues, scourges, and pains,
Which visit those cities to cleanliness cold.

Or, finally: Julia Moore’s “Little Libbie”:

While eating dinner, this dear little child
Was choked on a piece of beef.
Doctors came, tried their skill awhile,
But none could give relief….

Some are such weird concepts that it’s hard to know what the poet was getting at, as in Robert Pollok’s “A Contretemps”, where an anatomist busy dissecting a corpse is surprised by the coming of the Last Judgment, with the body splayed open on his table coming to life and rising in glory.

Most of the poets in this collection are unknown today, but some of them are among the most famous of their times. There is an oft’ quoted line from Horace’s Ars Poetica (c. 18 B.C.) that is usually translated as “even Homer sometimes nods,” meaning that even the greatest poets are not great all the time and have their off moments. ‘Tis true, for in this collection you will find howlers by Goldsmith, Robert Burns, Wordsworth, Keats, Longfellow, Addison, Emerson, Tennyson, and Poe.

Even if poetry is not your thing, this is an inspired collection. If you ever thought that poets are just different from the rest of us, this book will not change your mind, but it will make you laugh out loud.

And finally, I will close with some more of the index entries:

- Astronomy, pursuit of, inconsistent with social obligations, 230
- Englishman, his heart a rich rough gem that leaps and strikes and glows and yearns, 200-1; sun never sets on his might, 201, thinks well of himself, ibid.
- Fire, wetness not an attribute of, 28
- Frenchmen, fraudful, mix sand with sugar, 90
- Gabriel, the Archangel, titivates himself, 25
- German place-names, the poet does his best with, 54
- Immortality, hope of, distinguishes man from silk-worm, 152
- Lamprey, osculatory feats of, 108
- Lays, female, tuneful but immoral, 103
- Liverpool, rapture experienced at, 196
- Mothers, brave men weep at mention of their, 232
- Oysters, when in season, 20; reason why they cannot be crossed in love, 108
- Sewage system, metropolitan, eulogised, 207
- Victoria, Queen, makes a dash for Frogmore, 17
- Warner, Mrs., goes house-hunting in heaven, 49
- Wives should wash occasionally, 63; a modicum of intelligence desirable in, 158; but not too much, 211

[^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The editors of this book must have literally enjoyed a hoot when compiling this compellingly readable selection of extracts of Bad Verse emanating from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

What is so enchanting about the exquisite breadth of Bad Verse to be found within the pages of “The Stuffed Owl”, is that as one wipes the tears of laughter from ones’ eyes, one winces for those mighty poets brought verily so to their knees. As a Brit, I cautiously venture to suggest that the following couplet might be inserted into the rites of every North American family’s Thanksgiving dinner:

“At last, by favour of Almighty God,
With bellying sail the fathers made Cape Cod”
-- Alfred Austin, “The Pilgrim Fathers” (pg.250)

Yet it was only after chortling and snorting my way through this book that I thought to look to see if, as I imagined, NYRB might have reviewed this book back in the mid-twentieth century. Sure enough “Slate” had, in 2003; at http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints... To boot, decent length biographies of Wyndham Lewis and Lee are also included.

Could “A Newly Stuffed Owl” ever take flight? Alas, I think not. The recognisable fundamental quality of stuffed-owlishness appears to require but a fleeting moment’s overheating of the unconscious imagination, prompted, produced and propelled into its full glory by the time-deficient scrabble of desperation to snatch that perfect line of metrical verse from the grasp of coquettish Muses.

I wonder, do Roger McGough and Wendy Cope -- two present-day wizards of disciplined and memorable verse emanating from wonderfully lively, experienced and practiced minds conjuring with great skill within formal rules --- have their own moments of stuffed-owlishness, -- only to be saved by their publishers?

Be inspired by “The Stuffed Owl”, and Charles Lee’s wickedly humorous verse introduction (pp.xxi-xxiv), from which:

… So sing the Masters of Bathetic Verse. / Follow their lead : do better, doing worse. …”.

[Terence]

I rarely laugh out loud when reading but I couldn't help myself when I read the following bit of absurdity (context: a man is returning to his lover from a sea voyage but impatient he leaps overboard and begins to swim toward the dock when he sees her waiting):

Her fair companions one and all
Rejoicing crowd the strand;
For now her lover swam in call,
And almost touch'd the land.

Then through the white surf did she haste
To clasp her lovely swain;
When, ah! a shark bit through his waist;
His heart's blood dy'd the main!

He shriek'd! his half sprung from the wave,
Streaming with purple gore,
And soon it found a living grave,
And, ah! was seen no more.

("Bryan and Pereene," James Grainger [1721-67])

It reminded me of that scene in "Deep Blue Sea" when the mutant shark leaps out of the water and attacks Samuel L. Jackson. Could the screenwriter have been a Grainger fan?

Here's another verse that takes a decidedly unexpected turn from the pen of the infamous Edward Bulwer-Lytton's son Robert:

I dream'd that I walked in Italy,
When the day was going down,
By a water that silently wander'd by
Thro' an old dim-lighted town,

Till I came to a palace fair to see,
Wide open the windows were.
My love at a window sat; and she
Beckon'd me up the stair....

When I came to the little rose-colour'd room,
From the curtain out flew a bat.
The window was open; and in the gloom
My love at the window sat.

She sat with her guitar on her knee,
But she was not singing a note,
For someone had drawn (ah, who could it be?)
A knife across her throat.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Illus by Beerbohm. J.M. Dent: London, 1930. 2nd edition, purchased Tavistock, 2004.

Though many bad verses here derive from lesser poets like Dyer, Colley Cibber, M. Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle), Cottle, Dobell and R. Montgomery, big names abound: Cowley, Dryden, Longfellow, Addison, Isaac Watts, even Keats, Browning and Tennyson. Longfellow he faults for a single Latin comparative, “Excelsior.”
Cowley you recall starred in Sam Johnson’s critique of the metaphysicals. Curiously, Abraham opposed Donne’s preferred puns in his "Ode. Of Wit,"
"’Tis not when like words make up one noise;
Jests for Dutch Men, and English Boys."
Oddly, he adds,
"Nor upon all things to obtrude
And force some odd similitude."
“Evidently he considered his own ‘odd similitudes’— very largely drawn, by Donne’s example, from the learned languages of science and religion—conventional comparisons” —quoted from my Ph.D. thesis, This Critical Age, p.76. In “Friendship in Absence,” Cowley’s poem on being separated from his love, he compares their love to stars’ conjunctions, but soon uses classical allusion defending wit:
" ’tis not without Cause that she,
Who fled the God of Wit, was made a tree.”
Or as Marvell has it, “Apollo hunted Daphne so/ Only that she might Laurel grow,” wittily arguing that A desired poetry, the Laurel, not Daphne herself. (My This Critical Age focused on metapoetry in mid-17C England— Cleveland and Marvell, following 16C Berni and DuBellay “Contre Les Petrarquistes.”)
Wyndham Lewis includes Cowley’s “Ode Upon Dr. Harvey,” starting with Nature a virgin, unknown, until Harvey appeared, and Nature
"Began to tremble and to flee,
Took sanctuary, like Daphne, in a tree;
There Daphne’s lover stopt, and thought it much
The very leaves of her to touch,
But Harvey, our Apollo, stops not so,
Into the bark and root he after her did go..

He so exactly does the work survey
As if he hired the workers by the day." (p.25)

Others besides Shelley wrote of the Skylark, like James Hogg,
"Bird of the wilderness,
Blithesome and cumberless." (3)

R.W. Emerson is included, his verse, not essays. His bust features in my U.U Church, New Bedford MA, because he was our interim minister in 1831; he may have learned to reject communion from our own Mary Rotch, who left the service when communion was served. (Forgive making communion sound like a restaurant.) Emerson’s “Efficiency,”
Earth, crowded, cries, “Too many men!”
My counsel is, kill nine in ten,
And bestow the shares of all
On the remnant decimal.
Add their nine lives to this cat.. (165)
Contrast his great poem, “The Titmouse,” (chickadee) where he concludes that a Chickadee saved him, miles from home in a blizzard, its birdtalk very like Caesar’s:
"I, who dreamed not when I came here
to find the antidote of fear
Now hear thee say in Roman key,
Paean! Veni, Vidi, Vici."
(Poems of R.W.Emerson.Walter Scott: London, n.d)

D.B. Wyndham Lewis fully expects a few readers to “dash this volume to the book-shop floor, crying derisively that one might as well pay admission to South Kensington to find the glass cases full of dead mice and little bits of string” (vii). He does not include faults in verse craftsmanship, suggests what makes it bad, “The most obvious tint is bathos: that sudden slip and swoop and slither as down a well-buttered slide”(x).

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's some pretty funny stuff in here. First published in 1930, it takes aim at poets of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The editors (D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee) restricted their selection to dead poets, understandably enough. This edition, reissued as part of the terrific New York Review Books Classics series, has an introduction by Billy Collins.

Apart from some of the most hilariously dreadful verse you're ever likely to encounter, the book has the following attractive features:

1. Seven satirical drawings (Mr Tennyson reading "in Memoriam" to his sovereign, Wordsworth at Cross Purposes in the Lake District, and so on)

2. Tongue-in-cheek, pull-no-punches, biographical sketches of the poets. (e.g., in the entry for Adam Lindsay Gordon, this sentence: "In 1870 he published Bush Ballads, and later in the year committed suicide").

3. Best subject index evah. Sample entries:
lamprey, osculatory feats of, 108;
Woman, useful protection against lions, 118;
Beethoven, shaky octave playing, 6.

Then there is the poetry. Though I haven't had a chance to take it all in, I am happy to report that the book meets the obvious minimum requirement for a collection like this - that old fraud Wordsworth is generously represented. He contributes not just the title poem, but other gems like these:

"That is a work of waste and ruin;
Consider, Charles, what you are doing"

"Spade! With which Wilkinson hath tilled his lands,"

"I had a son, who many a day
Sailed on the sea; but he is dead;
In Denmark he was cast away;
And I have travelled far as Hull to see
what clothes he might have left, or other property."

(The Sailor's Mother).

Plenty of stuff from the usual suspects - Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle; Julia Moore (the sweet singer of Michigan), Burns, Byron, Poe, Tennyson, .....

I think it can actually be said of this book - It's a laff riot!

[Emily W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up when I was writing about Wordsworth's The Stuffed Owl for my friend's taxidermy magazine. I'm still offended on behalf of the poem, which I think is rather nice. Better to have named the books for the biting shark of Bryan and Pereene - one of a few laugh-out-loud moments. Recommended for the erudite bathroom!

[Nullifidian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is hilarious, though I could only stand to read a little bit of it at a time. Too much bad poetry at one time stops being funny and starts to feel oppressive. Nevertheless, now that I have finally read the whole thing, I'm convinced that this will become a much-loved book I will frequently dip into, reading favorite passages of incompetently executed verse. Several are already firm favorites, such as the serial metaphors of Margaret Cavendish, the obsessive and superfluous footnoting of Edward Edwin Foot, Robert Montgomery's didactic verse and Thomas Macaulay's exquisitely sarcastic rejoinders to it, and the vivid and virile imagery of Adam Lindsay Gordon. Take the following example of the latter's art:

Flash! flash! bang! bang! and we blazed away,
And the grey roof reddened and rang;
Flash! flash! and I felt his bullet flay
The tip of my ear. Flash! bang!
Bang! flash! and my pistol arm fell broke;
I struck with my left hand then --
Struck at a corpse through a cloud of smoke --
I had shot him dead in his den!
("Wolf and Hound" by Adam Lindsay Gordon)

Connoisseurs of WWI poetry will note the resemblance to the verse of Private S. Baldrick, chiefly to his magnum opus titled "The German Guns".

And this brilliant verse from Julia Moore:

Ah, from this Temperance army,
Your feet shall never stray,
Your mind will then be balmy
If you keep the shining way.
("The Temperance Army")

A strict adherence to the rhyme scheme suggests a different "b"-word for "balmy", and one that also has to do with the mind, which is doubtless why this poem so amused the (British) editors.

The one regrettable omission in this anthology is that it stops chronologically with Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and therefore the reader must look elsewhere for the great achievements in verse wrought by William McGonagall, who was born sixteen years later.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun collection of some very awful poetry, by poets both renowned and obscure. If you're a writer, this book is a great ego boost.

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The difference between good poetry and bad poetry is the difference between a high flying eagle and a stuffed owl". ---Robert Graves, attributed
"Ninety-nine percent of all poetry written in the English language is awful". So went the introduction to a textbook on poetry written by a British scholar I read the year before entering UCLA. "Bad poetry is easily recognizable. It is not memorable". Yes, but what makes a poem really bite it, stink to high heaven, give you rabies? Bad poets are a dime a dozen. Think of Edgar A. Guest, "It takes a heap o' living to make a house a home". Finding the truly worst is a task for a literary master. In this anthology Wyndham Lewis, novelist, painter and friend of Ezra Pound, set out to select those English language poems that make your stomach turn at first glance. Even great poets can compose excrement, hence it's no surprise that Coleridge, Tennyson and Whitman are found in these pages. But, when people noted for high accomplishments in other fields try their hands at poetry that's when the perverse pleasure of reading bad poesy really begins. Take, for example, Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles and an important scientist in his own right. Erasmus delighted in writing about nature, leaving us with the immortal "The Birth of KNO squared" and "so still the Tadpole cleaves the watery vale". Then there is Sir Ronald Ross, the Scottish physician and Noble Prize Winner in Medicine, who discovered that malaria is transmitted by the mosquito. Sir Ronald fancied himself a poet and wrote a poem thanking God for giving him the light to see that malaria is transmitted by the mosquito: "I find thy cunning seed/ O millionth murdering Death". You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll hurl at this poetic underworld.

[Frederick Gault · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fun

[Kay]

DNF but mostly enjoyed what I did read

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well known collection of bad poetry crossing several centuries. Of note it's not just obscure poets, some entries are from Byron and Tennyson.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is interesting to read a collection of curated bad poetry. But it's still a book of bad poetry. Maybe a bit too long.

[Samantha M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book to be read aloud with thespian overembellishment.
It's a ... real hoot.

[DeterminedStupor]

Have only read up to John Armstrong.

[Towelette Petatucci · Rating 3 out of 5]

"And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond,
Though but of compass small, and bare
To thirsty suns and parching air.
I've measured it from side to side;
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

- William Wordsworth, 'The Thorn'

wyndham-lewis and lee's 'the stuffed owl' was first published in 1930. i bring this up because it may stand as the first piece of media ever preoccupied with our modern predilection for camp. since there's been art, there have always been those in the audience with a morbid predilection for the outlandish or outrageous. but in the 20th century, that interaction began to adapt to a rapidly swelling media landscape, and mere absurdity became old hat. in its place, critics and commentators began to fixate on failures of vision. awkward oddities, works with visible gulfs between reach and grasp, well-intentioned calamities, and unintentional self-effacements.

this epoch of the post-modern camp spiked with the emergence of celebrity film critics, but didn't reach a white-hot crescendo until the apex of the digital age. now, everyone has a pet farce they can mock and admire in equal measure! 'the stuffed owl' might be chiefly concerned with poetry, but its mixture of sophisticated incredulity and affectionate sympathy is echoed in modern sentiments expressed for such works as 'the room', 'who killed captain alex?', 'birdemic', or 'morbius'. what these editors tapped into... in 1930... was that same spark of teasing fondness born out of the callouses of media oversaturation.

because it's easy to look upon 'the stuffed owl' as something cruel. and, to an extent, it is. but to a much greater extent, the joy one can derive from these excerpts of vexing verse more closely resembles a kind of holistic self-awareness. a "there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-i" type deal. anyone who has ever had a creative impulse in their life has surely winced at something they've done in the past (the very best of my old hip-hop lyrics don't come close to the very worst in this book). we, as empathic animals, admire the impulse to create, even if it flounders as hilariously as many in this book do.

that's why, laugh though we might at a pair of lovers separated by sudden shark attack, or a monk telling rowdy youths to stop dancing on his mother's grave, or the movements of the celestial bodies being honestly conflated with capitalistic commerce (no, seriously), that laughter is tempered by a good, honest sense of pathos.

the verse compiled here are riotously funny, of course. and i annoyed many of my friends with passages (that shark attack, especially). wyndham-lewis and lee have done a great job finding poetry which isn't merely "not good", but a very specific kind of artisanally dreadful. nearly everyone in the book is well-to-do, accomplished, or notable in some capacity. so often their failure to express themselves is a failure to bridge that gulf between intellectualised ideas and the needs of verse. it's a good read if one wants to see the conditions that free verse was allowed to thrive in. game as some of these are, epic stanzas devoted to how steam power will bring about a new Eden on earth are not naturally served by this form.

where the book falls flat is that, since 1930, the public's poetry-savviness has lapsed considerably. speaking for myself, a verse novice, the first half was intermittently quite dull. some entire sections pass by without anything too extreme or riotous to grab the attention, and it's hard to parse the absurdities when our cultural context is so removed. things do pick up, however, in the back end, once the verse becomes freer, and the language more closely resembles our current vernacular.

of particular note is the astonishing index page, worth reading alone for such gems as "Botanist, as mountaineer, inferior to goat, 82", "Planets, mercantile activities of, 72", "manure, adjudged a fit subject for a muse, 91", or "Norns, reboantic, 185". indeed, at the book's most obscure, the modern reader is aided by editorial commentary from the compilers. largely this is comprised of short biographers of each subject, and the conditions their muse failed them. and even if you're clever and don't need the help, their enthusiasm for the material is infectious.

'the stuffed owl' might work better as a reference book, a party favour your bring out to amuse your guests. my having read it cover-to-cover probably wasn't it at its finest. but however long it takes, you should read it in its entirety, whether you like poetry or not. it's one of the earliest and one of the definitive documents in post-irony, the sincere revelry of failed art.

[Dami (Damiellar) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just love this book.

I was directed to it via The Book of Heroic Failures: The Official Handbook of the Not Terribly Good Club of Great Britain so was quite pleased indeed when I came across it (and only at $3!)

This is unabashedly bad poetry. The book starts off with a some 1 or 2 line excerpts but it's the longer ones which I enjoy most

An example:

What is liquid - Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

All that doth flow we cannot liquid name,
Or else would fie and water be the same;
But that is liquid which is moist and wet;
Fire that propriety can never get:
Then 'tis not cold that doth the fire put out,
But 'tis the wet that makes it die, no doubt.

[Hilary · Rating 5 out of 5]

The finest collection of truly terrible poetry you could wish for. Clunkers from some surprising quarters, including Wordsworth, Dryden and Tennyson. Hymn-writers give good value: "Oh may thy powerful word | Inspire the feeble worm | To rush into thy kingdom, Lord | And take it as by storm." And how about "Life scums the cream of beauty with Time's spoon" - oh! How true, how very true! And how beautifully put! Open any page at random, and gems like that fall out.

[Samantha · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my all-time favorites, this book is filled with the most glorious clunkers ever to grace a the English language, and a tremendous index to boot. Here's a taste, about a gentleman who accidentally ate a poisonous mushroom: And in a dark and trying hour / (Man hath his days of woe!), / He found in vegetable power / A dreadful, deadly foe!

[Jacques Bromberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection is kind of fun, but it really is full of some god-awful poetry. It's hard to believe that some of this stuff is for real!