The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology Of Bad Verse, selected and arranged by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee, Introduction by Billy Collins

This book is, to some extents, a project of its time, the early 20th century, when it first became popular to deconstruct the culture that until then had been both very popular in general as well as critically acclaimed. In so doing, the authors (and the writer of the introduction) comment on the difference that exists between mediocre art that merely tires or exhausts or bores the reader and truly awful writing that amuses us because of our own feelings of smug and cynical superiority to the people who wrote such things. The authors are not merely punching down either–while a few of the authors are themselves the sort of people whose passion for writing and whose generally obscurity are similar enough to one’s own that one has to be at least somewhat concerned about being in future volume of this work or one based on it, most of the poems are by people considered to be literary greats, like Edgar Allen Poe, Dryden, Isaac Watts (noted hymn author, thankfully none of those are included here), Erasmus Darwin, Robert Burns (though not in Scots), Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others of similar level.

One of the most notable aspects of this book is what makes a work truly awful enough in the compilers’ mind to belong in a work like this. Generally speaking, the authors (as befits a post World War I group), are highly sensitive to inflamed nationalist appeals, which other generations might not have viewed as harshly. Similarly, the authors are interested in the way that sincere emotional feeling is combined with rigid rhyme schemes (which have since gone out of style in modernist and post-modernist poetry), and subject matter that the authors view as being too mundane for poetry. The restraint of the authors in avoiding poets still alive (and perhaps with barristers willing to sue for libel) is praiseworthy, but although this book does contain some verse that is howlingly bad, a great deal of the verse only seems bad if one approaches poetry from a very cynical perspective. Otherwise, this book contains at least some verse that is worth enjoying on its own levels, and one can easily see that the taste of poetry changed between when these poems were published and perhaps even appreciated to the time when verses like these can be enjoyed by those who consider themselves to be of the contemporary spirit of the times if they are not taken seriously, as ridiculous bathos. Whether this says more about the poets themselves or about our own cynicism and decadence as an age I leave to the reader to decide.

In terms of its contents, this book is a bit more than 200 pages. It begins with an introduction, then a preface by the compilers in 1930 or thereabouts. This is followed by a proem, where one of the compilers discusses the bathetic nature of the poems that are to follow, which again says more about him than about the feelings of the poets themselves. After that there is a detailed table of contents, which is followed by some 25 pages of hor d’oeuvres divided into two sections. Then the author has a roughly chronologically organized selection of poetry and excerpts that are judged wanting. The author begins with Abraham Cowley, then moves on to Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle. After this they move on to John Dryden, John Banks, Thomas Sprat, John Sheffield, Nahum Tate, Sir Richard Blackmore, Joseph Addison, Isaac Watts, Colley Cibber, Ambrose Philips, Lord Hervey John, John Armstrong, Edward Young, John Dyer, William Shenstone, Joseph Warton, James Grainger, Thomas Warton the younger, Edward Jerningham, Christopher Smart, Oliver Goldsmith, John Duncombe, Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Chatterton, George Crabbe, Robert Burns, Robert Merry, Hannah Cowley, a couple of Della Cruscans, Mary Robinson, Joseph Cottle, Robert Southey, James Henry Leigh Hunt, Henry Kirke White, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Cornelius Whur, Robert Pollok, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Haynes Bayly, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Robert Montgomery, Charles Mackay, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Holley Chivers, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, T. Baker, Eliza Cook, Samuel Carter, Martin Farquhar Tupper, John Close, Sydney Thompson Dobell, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton, George Everleigh, Edward Edwin Foot, Adam Lindsay Gordon, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Interspersed among the poems (heavy slanted, it seems, against Scottish poets, for some reason), there are some drawings, followed by a postprandial, an odd and quirky subject index, and then an index of authors.