"Genius Still Unrecognised" - The Worst Poet in the World
From Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Published 8/15/2025
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?See…
