William Mcgonagall

Author : Chris Hunt,Colin Walker
Publisher : Birlinn
Page : 618 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2011-06-14
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9780857900739

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William McGonagall by Chris Hunt,Colin Walker Pdf

William McGonagall was born in Edinburgh in 1830. His father was a poor hand-loom weaver, and his work took his family to Glasgow, then to Dundee. William attended school for eighteen months before the age of seven, and received no further formal education. Later, as a mill worker, he used to read books in the evening, taking great interest in Shakespeare's plays. In 1877, McGonagall suddenly discovered himself 'to be a poet'. Since then, thousands of people the world over have enjoyed the verse of Scotland's alternative national poet. This volume brings together the three famous collections – Poetic Gems, More Poetic Gems and Last Poetic Gems, and also includes an introduction by Chris Hunt, the webmaster of the McGonagall website www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk, indexes of poem titles and first lines, and features the first publication of McGonagall's only play, Jack o' the Cudgel, written in 1886 but not performed publicly until 2002.

Author : William McGonagall
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 132 pages
File Size : 49,9 Mb
Release : 1979-09
Category : Electronic
ISBN : UCSC:32106005319733

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The World's Worst Poet by William McGonagall Pdf

Author : William McGonagall
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 48,5 Mb
Release : 1961
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:27300006

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Poetic Gems by William McGonagall Pdf

Author : William Topaz McGonagall
Publisher : Clipper Audio
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2013-06-01
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 147123343X

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William Mcgonagall by William Topaz McGonagall Pdf

For over a hundred years, William McGonagall (1830-1902) has been CLIPPER almost universally recognised as the worst poet in English. Utterly convinced of his genius, he remained untroubled by any worrisome self-doubt, despite the mockery of his audiences. This collection brings together some of his best-known works (The Tay Bridge Disaster, The Battle of Tel-el-Kebir), some lesser-known gems (Beecham's Pills, The Faithful Dog Fido), and some autobiographical writings that tell of his ill-fated trip to Balmoral, of his much-fêted performance as Macbeth (in which he was so popular he decided not to die), and why publicans threw peas at him.

Author : Charles Nasmyth,William McGonagall
Publisher : Waverley Books Limited
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Poets, Scottish
ISBN : 1902407539

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The Comic Legend of William McGonagall by Charles Nasmyth,William McGonagall Pdf

Scots, young and old, at home and abroad, celebrate the memory of 'the worst poet of all time', William McGonagall, and this new presentation of his work will appeal to those who already hold him dear, and bring a new audience to his work.

Author : Ben Lerner
Publisher : FSG Originals
Page : 96 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2016-06-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780374712334

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The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner Pdf

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

Author : John Goodridge
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 2020-08-13
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781000748376

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Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets Vol 3 by John Goodridge Pdf

Over 100 poets of labouring class origin were published in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Some were hugely popular and important in their day but few are available today. This is a collection of some of those poems from the 19th century.

Author : Spike Milligan,Jack Hobbs
Publisher : Michael Joseph
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 45,5 Mb
Release : 1988
Category : Fiction
ISBN : UCSC:32106009282077

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William McGonagall Meets George Gershwin by Spike Milligan,Jack Hobbs Pdf

Author : Gary McNair
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 105 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2018-12-05
Category : Poetry
ISBN : 9781786826831

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McGonagall’s Chronicles by Gary McNair Pdf

"I'm in love with a man from Dundee Though he lived 100 years or so before me He was a poet He was aware of this" A tragic comedy, McGonagall's Chronicles charts the true life story of the worst poet of all time: William McGonagall. With wit, candour and warmth, Gary McNair tries to understand how McGonagall could be so bad at what he did, and gets to the heart of the dilemma that surrounds his legend – is it okay for us to laugh at someone's obvious and relentless failings?

Author : Kathryn Petras,Ross Petras
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 145 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 1997-03-25
Category : Humor
ISBN : 9780679776222

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Very Bad Poetry by Kathryn Petras,Ross Petras Pdf

Writing very bad poetry requires talent. It helps to have a wooden ear for words, a penchant for sinking into a mire of sentimentality, and an enviable confidence that allows one to write despite absolutely appalling incompetence. The 131 poems collected in this first-of-its-kind anthology are so glaringly awful that they embody a kind of genius. From Fred Emerson Brooks' "The Stuttering Lover" to Matthew Green's "The Spleen" to Georgia Bailey Parrington's misguided "An Elegy to a Dissected Puppy", they mangle meter, run rampant over rhyme, and bludgeon us into insensibility with their grandiosity, anticlimax, and malapropism. Guaranteed to move even the most stoic reader to tears (of laughter), Very Bad Poetry is sure to become a favorite of the poetically inclined (and disinclined).

Author : Kirstie Blair
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 47,7 Mb
Release : 2019-06-20
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780192581969

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Working Verse in Victorian Scotland by Kirstie Blair Pdf

This volume reassesses working-class poetry and poetics in Victorian Britain, using Scotland as a focus and with particular attention to the role of the popular press in fostering and disseminating working-class verse cultures. It studies a very wide variety of writers who are unknown to scholarship, and assesses the political, social, and cultural work which their poetry performed. During the Victorian period, Scotland underwent unprecedented changes in terms of industrialization, the rise of the city, migration, and emigration. This study shows how poets who defined themselves as part of a specifically Scottish tradition responded to these changes. It substantially revises our understanding of Scottish literature in this period, while contributing to wider investigations of the role of popular verse in national and international cultures.

Author : Matthew Bevis
Publisher : OUP Oxford
Page : 908 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2013-10-31
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780191653032

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The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry by Matthew Bevis Pdf

'I am inclined to think that we want new forms . . . as well as thoughts', confessed Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning in 1845. The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry provides a closely-read appreciation of the vibrancy and variety of Victorian poetic forms, and attends to poems as both shaped and shaping forces. The volume is divided into four main sections. The first section on 'Form' looks at a few central innovations and engagements—'Rhythm', 'Beat', 'Address', 'Rhyme', 'Diction', 'Syntax', and 'Story'. The second section, 'Literary Landscapes', examines the traditions and writers (from classical times to the present day) that influence and take their bearings from Victorian poets. The third section provides 'Readings' of twenty-three poets by concentrating on particular poems or collections of poems, offering focused, nuanced engagements with the pleasures and challenges offered by particular styles of thinking and writing. The final section, 'The Place of Poetry', conceives and explores 'place' in a range of ways in order to situate Victorian poetry within broader contexts and discussions: the places in which poems were encountered; the poetic representation and embodiment of various sites and spaces; the location of the 'Victorian' alongside other territories and nationalities; and debates about the place - and displacement - of poetry in Victorian society. This Handbook is designed to be not only an essential resource for those interested in Victorian poetry and poetics, but also a landmark publication—provocative, seminal volume that will offer a lasting contribution to future studies in the area.

Author : William McGonagall
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 1968
Category : Electronic
ISBN : OCLC:852115955

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Selected from the Works of William McGonagall, Poet and Tragedian by William McGonagall Pdf

Author : William McGonagall
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 52 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2010-01-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1409931005

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The Autobiography of Sir William Topaz McGonagall (Illustrated Edition) (Dodo Press) by William McGonagall Pdf

William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902) was a Scottish weaver, actor and poet. He has been widely acclaimed as the worst poet in British history. The chief criticisms of his poetry are that he is deaf to poetic metaphor and unable to scan correctly. In the hands of lesser artists, this might simply generate dull, uninspiring verse. However, McGonagall's fame stems from the humourous effects these shortcomings generate. The inappropriate rhythms, weak vocabulary, and illadvised imagery combine to make his work amongst the most spontaneously amusing comic poetry in the English language. Of the 200 or so poems that he wrote, the most famous is probably The Tay Bridge Disaster, which recounts the events of the evening of 28 December 1879, when, during a severe gale, the Tay Rail Bridge near Dundee collapsed as a train was passing over it. He also campaigned vigorously against excessive drinking, appearing in pubs and bars to give edifying poems and speeches. These were very popular, the people of Dundee possibly recognising that McGonagall was "so giftedly bad he backed unwittingly into genius."

Author : Robert H. MacDonald
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 298 pages
File Size : 52,8 Mb
Release : 1994
Category : History
ISBN : 0719037492

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The Language of Empire by Robert H. MacDonald Pdf

The debate about the Empire dealt in idealism and morality, and both sides employed the language of feeling, and frequently argued their case in dramatic terms. This book opposes two sides of the Empire, first, as it was presented to the public in Britain, and second, as it was experienced or imagined by its subjects abroad. British imperialism was nurtured by such upper middle-class institutions as the public schools, the wardrooms and officers' messes, and the conservative press. The attitudes of 1916 can best be recovered through a reconstruction of a poetics of popular imperialism. The case-study of Rhodesia demonstrates the almost instant application of myth and sign to a contemporary imperial crisis. Rudyard Kipling was acknowledged throughout the English-speaking world not only as a wonderful teller of stories but as the 'singer of Greater Britain', or, as 'the Laureate of Empire'. In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Empire gained a beachhead in the classroom, particularly in the coupling of geography and history. The Island Story underlined that stories of heroic soldiers and 'fights for the flag' were easier for teachers to present to children than lessons in morality, or abstractions about liberty and responsible government. The Education Act of 1870 had created a need for standard readers in schools; readers designed to teach boys and girls to be useful citizens. The Indian Mutiny was the supreme test of the imperial conscience, a measure of the morality of the 'master-nation'.