Though He’s Now Long Dead, His Fame Has Spread : In Scotland They All Know It, McGonagall Is a Truly Bad Poet

Scotland does its poets proud, and no town is without its statue to Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott or Robert Louis Stevenson. But mention The Great McGonagall in his hometown and reactions range from a fond chuckle to pained silence.

To connoisseurs of ghastly verse, William McGonagall is a national treasure, proclaimed by The Times of London as “a real genius, for he is the only memorable truly bad poet in our language.”

A century after his heyday, McGonagall’s tortured rhymes and fractured meters have earned him a cult following that ranges from Boise, Idaho, to Manchuria.

The British royal family is among his devotees, and in the ultimate accolade, the Oxford Companion to English Literature mentions him as “the world’s worst poet.”

Dundee, McGonagall’s home town on Scotland’s east coast, is divided between those who want to give him the full commemorative treatment and those who fervently wish the muse of poetry had gone someplace else to deliver her most celebrated misfit.

City Hall has blocked attempts by McGonagall fans to put up a statue to him, allowing only the modest gesture of a plaque on a park bench near the Burns statue.

Some Dundonians would say even that is too much for the man who produced this leaden ode to an iceberg:

And the stranger in amazement stands aghast

As he beholds the water flowing off the melted ice

Adown the mountain sides, that he cries out, Oh, how nice!

Or this galumphing lament at the collapse of Dundee’s Tay Bridge under a train:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

Alas! I a very sorry to say

That ninety lives have been taken away

On the last Sabbath day of 1879,

Which will be remembered for a very long time.

Says David Tennant, a Dundee municipality spokesman, “There’s a love-hate relationship between McGonagall and Dundee. I suppose it’s a case of a poet not being recognized on his own native heath.”

Jim Mackie, manager of the David Winter publishing house in Dundee, which printed McGonagall’s first poems and still puts out best-selling McGonagall anthologies, says: “I suppose Dundonians don’t want to be associated with someone who’s famous for doing something so badly.”

Willie Smith, who recently retired as manager of David Winter, insists that McGonagall was a genius.

“Here was a man with just 18 months of schooling who could recite Shakespeare and who wrote 576 poems, all of which are published. His anthologies have sold half a million copies. That’s more than Robbie Burns. So who judges genius? Who judges Picasso? Who’s to judge McGonagall?”

Rare is the poet, however great, who never drops the occasional clunker. But equally rare is the poet of McGonagall’s stature, whose poems, without exception, were “of a magical dreadfulness that reached the sublime,” as the late Scottish commentator James Cameron wrote.

From McGonagall’s brief autobiography, one learns that he was born in 1825 or 1830, worked as a jute weaver and developed a passion for Shakespeare.

Taking to the stage, his stentorian voice and shoulder-length hair quickly singled him out as a crowd-drawing eccentric.

Playing Macbeth, he once got so carried away that he refused to fall down dead. “Lay doon, McGonagall, lay doon!” hissed the hapless Macduff.

He could not believe the audiences came for the laughs, not the drama, and wrote of his puzzlement at people who would waylay him outside the stage door and pull his hat over his eyes.

Only in his 40s did he take up poetry, describing in his autobiography how one day, sitting lonely in his room and wishing he could afford a vacation, he suddenly imagined he heard a voice crying, “Write! Write!”

His first ode went on sale at a penny a sheet, printed up on leaflets free of charge by David Winter. Reviewers reacted to the new bard with polite amusement that the humorless McGonagall mistook for praise, assuming the title of “William McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian.”

He sent a selection of his verse to Queen Victoria. The palace’s formula acknowledgment emboldened him to assume the even more impressive title of “William McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian, by Appointment to Her Majesty.” He even walked through a rainstorm to her Scottish castle hoping to give a recital, but was threatened by the gatekeeper with arrest.

Nothing discouraged him. No battle, disaster, celebrity death, or royal event escaped the McGonagall treatment. Every town he visited inspired an ode:

Bonnie Kilmany in the county of Fife

Is a healthy spot to reside in to lengthen one’s life. . . .

Ye lovers of the picturesque, if ye would drown your grief

Take my advice and visit the ancient town of Crieff. . . .

His wife and children went hungry and faced eviction from their cottage while Dundee, a hard-drinking, ruffian sort of town, turned McGonagall-baiting into a sport.

He was pelted with peas, pies and rotten hams, shouted down by hecklers, mocked by street urchins as “Mad McGonagall,” and hounded by magistrates for causing the unruliness.

A barman, incensed at McGonagall for having the nerve to recite teetotaling propaganda in his pub, stuffed a wet towel in his mouth.

Soon he was refusing to perform unless a clergyman sat on the stage.

In 1887, fed up with these riotous spectacles, Dundee’s elders bought McGonagall a one-way ticket to New York. But he soon returned, unimpressed except by the skyscrapers:

They were the only thing that seemed to arrest my eye

Because many of them are thirteen stories high.

eventually overcame him, and one morning Dundonians were informed in a new poem:

Welcome, thrice welcome! To the year 1893,

For it is the year that I intend to leave Dundee

Owing to the treatment I receive

Which does my heart sadly grieve.

Every morning when I go out,

The ignorant rabble they do shout

‘There goes Mad McGonagall’

In derisive shouts as loud as they can bawl.

The next year he moved to Perth, where he died in 1902 and was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

But his fame began to spread. Actor Alec Guinness showed interest in his Shakespearean roles. Playwright Noel Coward adapted a McGonagall poem to song. Actor Peter Sellers popularized him on radio.

What lifted his poetry above the simply banal was his indomitable spirit. Each artless line and clumsy rhyme radiated passion--grief over a disaster, pride over a battle won, hatred for intoxicating spirits, love of God and reverence for His creatures.

He would recite his poem about the Battle of Bannockburn, brandishing a sword with such exuberance that the patrons in the front rows had to duck. McGonagall was, in commentator Cameron’s fond tribute, “one of God’s clumsy innocents who found his way among the angels.”

Smith, at 71 a tireless promoter of The Great McGonagall, says McGonagall societies exist in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Boise, Idaho, as well as Toronto, Halifax and Vancouver in Canada.

“Yet here in Dundee,” he says, “they won’t put up a statue to him. It’s a great shame.”

Smith has visited Japan at the invitation of the local McGonagall society, and in Manchuria he discovered McGonagall poems translated into Chinese.

“The students told me he translates very well.”