Podcasts · Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

"Genius Still Unrecognised" - The Worst Poet in the World

· 40 min · S6 E32

Episode "Genius Still Unrecognised" - The Worst Poet in the World

0:00 40:03

William McGonagall's poems are something else. The jarring meter, the banal imagery, the awkward rhymes: they made him a laughing stock in 19th Century Scotland and are still derided to this day. How does someone get that bad at poetry? Or have we been misunderstanding McGonagall all along?

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Transcript

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