Do you recognize this passage?
Homme petit d’homme petit, s’attend, n’avale
Homme petit d’homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles
Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s’y mènent
Coup d’un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine
No? Try reading it aloud.
Cognitive scientists use it to illustrate the complexity of human communications.
Among bad poets, James McIntyre (1828-1906) became known as “the Chaucer of Cheese” for his pastoral odes to Ontario and its dairy culture:
The ancient poets ne’er did dream
That Canada was land of cream,
They ne’er imagined it could flow
In this cold land of ice and snow,
Where everything did solid freeze
They ne’er hoped or looked for cheese.
McIntyre was remarkably bad, but can he compete with the worst of all time? Yes, declared the mayor of Ingersoll: “He was every bit as bad as McGonagall — and a lot less talented.”
Dorothy Parker wrote:
Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.
Ogden Nash responded:
A girl who is bespectacled
She may not get her nectackled
But safety pins and bassinets
Await the girl who fassinets.
If an S and an I and an O and a U
With an X at the end spell Su;
And an E and a Y and an E spell I,
Pray what is a speller to do?
Then, if also an S and an I and a G
And an HED spell side,
There’s nothing much left for a speller to do
But to go and commit siouxeyesighed.
— Charles Follen Adams
There was a young man of St. Bees
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp.
When they asked, “Does it hurt?”
He replied, “No, it doesn’t;
I’m so glad it wasn’t a hornet.”
— W.S. Gilbert
Making toast at the fireside,
Nurse fell in the grate and died;
And, what makes it ten times worse,
All the toast was burned with Nurse.
— Col. D. Streamer
William Whewell was a giant of 19th-century science, but he may have missed his true calling. Someone pointed out that his classic Elementary Treatise on Mechanics contains the following poetic sentence:
And hence no force, however great,
can stretch a cord, however fine,
into a horizontal line
that shall be absolutely straight.
Then again, maybe not: Whewell quietly changed the wording in the next edition.
Max Beerbohm noticed a similar happenstance in the first edition of his collected works:
‘London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.’
This plain announcement, nicely read,
Iambically runs.
Virgil’s Aeneid contains arguably the first written reference to pizza:
Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:
“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”
An immortally bad poem by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673):
What Is Liquid?
All that doth flow we cannot liquid name
Or else would fire and water be the same;
But that is liquid which is moist and wet
Fire that property can never get.
Then ’tis not cold that doth the fire put out
But ’tis the wet that makes it die, no doubt.
Samuel Pepys called it “the most ridiculous thing that ever was wrote.”
More bad poetry, from J.B. Smiley’s A Basket of Chips (1888):
The north winds are still and the blizzards at rest,
All in the beautiful spring.
The dear little robins are building their nests,
All in the beautiful spring.
The tramp appears and for lodging begs,
The old hen setteth on turkey eggs,
And the horse has scratches in all four legs,
All in the beautiful spring.
Kalamazoo
On the outskirts are celery marshes
Which only a few years ago
Were as wet as a drugstore in Kansas
And as worthless as marshes could grow,
Well some genius bethought him to drain them
And to add in a short year or two
About eighty-five thousand dollars
To the income of Kalamazoo.
The Michigan Insane Asylum
Is up on the top of the hill,
And some irresponsible crazies
Meander around there at will,
And they frequently talk to a stranger,
And they sometimes escape, it is true,
But the folks are not all of them crazy
Who hail from Kalamazoo.