Lapham's Quarterly Unveils Worst Famous English Language 'Disaster Poet'

For Lapham's Quarterly, Matthew Sherrill assigns poet William McGonagall the unfortunate title of "Worst Famous English Language Poet," due, in part, to poems like "The Tay Bridge Disaster." "Despite a penchant for the versified guidebook," Sherrill writes, "the principal thematic fixture of McGonagall’s career was cataclysm." More: 

“The Tay Bridge Disaster” was only the inaugurating work in a long series of calamity chronicles. It seems as if the poet never met a catastrophe that he didn’t contrive to transform into misguided elegy. Shipwrecks were his forte, but any disaster would do, really. He memorialized the victims of fires, tornadoes, stampedes, floods, military routs, any mass-casualty event that would have found its way into the Dundee press. According to Norman Watson, McGonagall’s biographer, out of the 270 poems attributed to McGonagall, twelve are on funerals, six on fires, fifty on battles, and twenty-four on “maritime disasters.” The poems’ rote, straightforward titles compose a global charnel house of grisly incident: “The Terrific Cyclone of 1893,” “The Pennsylvania Disaster,” “The Horrors of Majuba,” “The Wreck of the Steamer ‘Stella,’ ” “The Great Yellow River Inundation in China.”

While remaining true to the general principles of McGonagallian style, these poems carried with them their own particular formal and phrasal tics. “The Pennsylvania Disaster,” written to commemorate the Johnstown Flood, is a useful case in point. The poem opens with a kind of dateline: “’Twas in the year of 1889, and in the month of June, / Ten thousand people met with a fearful doom.” The death count established, the reader adequately oriented in historical time, McGonagall moves on to narrate the horrors of the flood in his characteristic tragic mode: comically flattened affect punctuated by mannered exclamations of grief.

Continue reading at Lapham's Quarterly.