Episode details
Sounds,18 Aug 2025,38 mins
"Genius Still Unrecognised" - The Worst Poet in the World
Cautionary Tales with Tim HarfordAvailable for over a year
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?
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