I agree with Wendy (and with John, too, it seems), that the O'Brien is Good, and maybe not Good Bad at all.

The McKuen is another matter. Thanks, Lo, for the link. I guess the fact that you've known it for 40 years must come into it; I learned the Newbolt "He Fell Among Thieves" at school and there's probably a certain amount of nostalgia in my enjoyment of it. The Mckuen might work OK as a song, of course, but I can't get the link Roger posted to work. I can imagine the last stanza as being effective, if put to a good tune.

Michael, do you want to be more specific on Sandburg? What are the Good ones? and the Good Bad ones?

Was it Orwell or Elder Olsen in an essay on Kipling who defined "good bad poetry" as "a graceful monument to the obvious"?

When I first read poetry, I was fond of Poe, Kipling, Wilde, Longfellow, Stevenson, and other poets who told a story or did magical things with sound and rhythm. Some of them now seem a bit over the top to me, but I'm still rather fond of them.

Susan

I can't pin the reference down, but I have an impression that somebody once discussed Thomas Hood's social protest poems, like 'The Song of the Shirt' and 'The Bridge of Sighs' in terms of 'good bad poetry' , which may reflect, as I think Gregory indicated, critical unease with a writer who has serious credentials but can reach a mass audience.

Longfellow, yes. He's as out of fashion as a poet can get, but there's some of his stuff I still enjoy enormously, like "Paul Revere's Ride.

I think the only copy of it I had was in a volume of poetry for children, which suggests that adults aren't supposed to take it seriously.

Jerome, yes, in the essay on Kipling, Orwell gives a list of other examples of "good bad poems", and they include "The Bridge of Sighs", "When All the World is Young, Lad", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", Bret Harte's "Dickens in Camp", "The Burial of Sir John Moore", "Jenny Kissed Me", "Keith of Ravelston", Casabianca". He goes on to say that "one could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting." This is clearly no longer true; I had to Google the last two poems he mentions (the first by Sidney Dobell, the second by Felicia Dorothea Hemans, if you're interested).

Anybody interested in other examples would do well to seek out a great anthology that Kingsley Amis edited in 1978, The Faber Popular Reciter. It doesn't seem to be in print any longer but there are plenty of copies available through Amazon at the modest price of one penny. Amis says in his introduction more or less what Orwell said: "When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War, the majority of the poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting." The anthology contains most of the names that have been mentioned in this thread so far (all of the names Susan cites), apart from the 20th-century ones; the anthology ends with the First World War. As Amis says, "during the 1930s this entire literary genre quite suddenly disappeared, never to return."

Maryann, ah Longfellow... That would deserve a thread on its own. A couple of years ago, I remember scandalising some by saying that if I were told for a bet that I had to read the complete works of either Longfellow or Whitman, I would definitely go for Longfellow. This was not to say that I consider him a better or more important poet than Whitman; clearly Whitman has had a greater impact on the development of American poetry. However, although the best Whitman is unique and extraordinary, there are pages and pages that are pure windy bombast. Longfellow is sometimes humdrum but is always competent and nearly always fun to read, even if only out of admiration for his technical skills. "Paul Revere's Ride" is a splendid piece of popular poetry but he's a great deal more varied than that (and that's something else he has over Whitman, I would suggest). Hiawatha probably did him a disfavour by becoming so extraordinarily famous - and so easy to parody; I would guess that more people today know Lewis Carroll's version than the original. Longfellow is at his best in medium-length narratives; anybody who doesn't know them would do well to look at his Tales from a Wayside Inn, which is a wonderful collection of tales in varied metres and stanza forms. Here's a link to "The Birds of Killingworth", which is a wonderful ecological fable in ottava rima. I'm also very fond of the dactylic hexameter poems, Evangeline and Miles Standish. But here's one of his shorter poems:

THE AFTERMATH

When the summer fields are mown,
When the birds are fledged and flown,
xxxAnd the dry leaves strew the path;
With the falling of the snow,
With the cawing of the crow,
Once again the fields we mow
xxxAnd gather in the aftermath.

Not the sweet, new grass with flowers
Is this harvesting of ours;
xxxNot the upland clover bloom;
But the rowen mixed with weeds,
Tangled tufts from marsh and meads,
Where the poppy drops its seeds
xxxIn the silence and the gloom.

(A little off-topic here, perhaps, since that isn't a Good Bad poem, I'd say, but a Good one, full stop.)

Greatr thread. I just recently read Lionel Trilling's essay on Kipling, in which he defends Kipling from the charge (brought by Eliot) that he wrote "verse" instead of poetry. "Verse" was probably Eliot's term for "good bad poetry" as distinct from "immortally bad poetry" such as the output of Julia A. Moore.

I confess to being quite fond of Kipling, especially of "Danny Deever" and "Tomlinson", which reminds us that "The sins we do by two and two/We pay for one by one."

John, I loved At Swim-Two Birds too, although I felt it lost some of its charm after the Pooka took over.

One definition of bad poetry: poems which aspire to move us with their tragedy but make us laugh - Casabianca and The Charge of the Light Brigade for me fall into this category. The best music-hall ballad cleverly has it both ways - The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, somehow being amusing and tragic at the same time.


The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

He was known as "Mad Carew" by the subs at Khatmandu,
He was hotter than they felt inclined to tell;
But for all his foolish pranks, he was worshipped in the ranks,
And the Colonel's daughter smiled on him as well.

He had loved her all along, with a passion of the strong,
The fact that she loved him was plain to all.
She was nearly twenty-one and arrangements had begun
To celebrate her birthday with a ball.

He wrote to ask what present she would like from Mad Carew;
They met next day as he dismissed a squad;
And jestingly she told him then that nothing else would do
But the green eye of the little Yellow God.

On the night before the dance, Mad Carew seemed in a trance,
And they chaffed him as they puffed at their cigars:
But for once he failed to smile, and he sat alone awhile,
Then went out into the night beneath the stars.

He returned before the dawn, with his shirt and tunic torn,
And a gash across his temple dripping red;
He was patched up right away, and he slept through all the day,
And the Colonel's daughter watched beside his bed.

He woke at last and asked if they could send his tunic through;
She brought it, and he thanked her with a nod;
He bade her search the pocket saying "That's from Mad Carew,"
And she found the little green eye of the god.

She upbraided poor Carew in the way that women do,
Though both her eyes were strangely hot and wet;
But she wouldn't take the stone and Mad Carew was left alone
With the jewel that he'd chanced his life to get.

When the ball was at its height, on that still and tropic night,
She thought of him and hurried to his room;
As she crossed the barrack square she could hear the dreamy air
Of a waltz tune softly stealing thro' the gloom.

His door was open wide, with silver moonlight shining through;
The place was wet and slipp'ry where she trod;
An ugly knife lay buried in the heart of Mad Carew,
'Twas the "Vengeance of the Little Yellow God."

There's a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There's a little marble cross below the town;
There's a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

J Milton Hayes

From "The Bridge of Sighs"
 

One of the great stanzas written in English:

Still, for all slips of hers,
   One of Eve's family—
Wipe those poor lips of hers
   Oozing so clammily.

Yeah, I agree Marcia.
Hood is just plain good.
The "direct", the relatively "simple" -- are these things "bad"?
No one would dare say the same of Blake, for example -- though there's more "hidden" complexity there. But some of his poems are just as "popular" and, after all, were written for children.
But it's an interesting distinction, and I'll have to give it some more thought ...