Published in Scotland Magazine Issue 5 on 4/11/2002.

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White Elephant

GAVIN D SMITH EXPLAINS THE PECULIAR SUCCESS OF SCOTLAND’S WORST POET WILLIAM MCGONAGALL, AKA ‘KNIGHT OF THE WHITE ELEPHANT OF BURMA’

Scotland’s second best-known poet after Burns”, I said to the magazine’s Editor, trying to persuade him to commission a feature about William McGonagall, who died a century ago this year. “Scotland’s second-best poet,” he mused. “No,” I replied, “second best-known. There’s a big difference.”

Robert Burns is acknowledged the world over as a fine writer by any standards – technically accomplished, sensitive and insightful, with an impressive breadth of subject matter and a clear mastery over it.

When it comes to William McGonagall, however, Scottish author William McIlvanney recently described him as the “… foremost poet of banal pomposity, excruciating scansion and rhymes of such numbing impact they could give you cauliflower ears just from silent reading.”

Indeed, if Burns can be judged Scotland’s best poet, then McGonagall is undoubtedly its worst, and to some even the World’s Worst Poet. Yet while Burns societies exist in every corner of the globe, McGonagall appreciation societies have proliferated in almost equal numbers. Some 300 websites are dedicated to McGonagall, including a number in the Russian and Romanian languages. The very awfulness of his work has become its virtue.

McGonagall lived for much of his life in Dundee, and according to the Director of Dundee’s ‘City of Discovery Campaign’, Petra Kydd, “we’ve been working to raise awareness of McGonagall and his poetry in recent years, and the amount of interest abroad is crazy. When we’ve issue press releases.....

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By Gavin D. Smith

Section : Scottish Poets

Page number : 56