Thanks, Holly, for the Ballad. It's one of those poems I'd often heard about or of, but had never actually read. Great fun. Definitely fits the category of this thread.

As for Hood, someone said somewhere (I think it was Chesterton), that it was from having written all those wonderful comic poems with their multiple puns ("But a cannon-ball took off his legs, / So he laid down his arms..."), that he acquired the epigrammatic skills for his more serious social poems:

Gregory, thanks for vindicating my erratic memory about Orwell and Hood, though I wouldn't agree with him on 'The Bridge of Sighs' as an example of 'good bad' poetry. I wouldn't put any of Hood's work in this category.

Eliot and Orwell surely can't have been including Kipling poems like 'The Way Through The Woods' or 'Harp Song of the Dane Women'?

I haven't come across the Amis anotholgy, but a similar one from 1967 (Michael Joseph) is Michael R. Turner's 'Parlour Poetry; 101 Improving Gems', which has Casabianca, Vitai Lampada, 'The Lost Chord' and several Longfellows. Hood is represented by 'The Song of the Shirt' and George R. Sims has 'In the Workhouse: Christmas day', among others, which makes an interesting contrast with Hood's earlier drier 'A Pauper's Christmas Carol'.

Sounds as if Longfellow is worth investigating.

I'm sorry, Wendy. My irony was hidden. The poem is terribly pleasurable, especially to read aloud, but awful. (Ditto Wordsworth's "The Idiot Boy.")

family
clammily
     !

I sort of want to like some of Hood's others. I was touched by "Silence" at the end of the movie The Piano, but I think the emotion of the movie helped it a lot.

"I Remember, I Remember": In his 20th Century Ox, Larkin has a poem "The Boy Actor," by Noel Coward. It begins

I can remember, I can remember

I think Coward's poem far superior.

Best,
Marcia

Marcia, maybe you don't know Hood's genuinely (not inadvertently) comic poetry, although you've probably heard lines from it, like:

That comes from Faithless Sally Brown, just one of a number of comic ballads; they're all full of puns, some of them excruciating but often quite witty. Here's another poem based entirely on one pun, but very effective:

xxxNo sun--no moon!
xxxNo morn--no noon!
No dawn--no dusk--no proper time of day--
xxxNo sky--no earthly view--
xxxNo distance looking blue--
No road--no street--no "t'other side this way"--
xxxNo end to any Row--
xxxNo indications where the Crescents go--
xxxNo top to any steeple--
No recognitions of familiar people--
xxxNo courtesies for showing 'em--
xxxNo knowing 'em!
No traveling at all--no locomotion--
No inkling of the way--no notion--
xxx"No go" by land or ocean--
xxxNo mail--no post--
No news from any foreign coast--
No Park, no Ring, no afternoon gentility--
xxxNo company--no nobility--
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
xxxNo comfortable feel in any member--
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
xxxNo fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds--
xxxxxxNovember!

I agree that "family / clammily" is pushing it in a poem intended to be taken seriously, and one wonders if the habit of excessive punning might have weakened his sensitivities. But in the same poem a couplet like "Look at her garments / Clinging like cerements" is pretty good, while remaining close to word-play. Taken as a whole I find the poem has an effectively haunting music and if you allow yourself to be swept along with it, even "family / clammily" doesn't sound too absurd. (The Victorians were less worried by feminine rhymes in serious poetry, I think.)

"The Song of the Shirt", however, doesn't require any special pleading. It's one of the great protest poems of all time.

Hmph. I'm still a bit grumpy about the notion that there even is such a thing as "good bad poetry"...there's either poetry you like or poetry you don't. Poetry that moves you or poetry that doesn't. Sure, McKuen does nothing for me...but neither do Nash, Lear, Whitman, Dickinson, Wordsworth, Burns, Cummings and a bunch of other famous poets, old and new. As a whole, I wouldn't call them "bad" but I wouldn't call them "good" either...I would simply call them "well-known." And in all of them, I would say that they have some material that I like...but most of it I do not.

The problem, when you start attributing value judgments to poets themselves (as opposed to individual poems), is that you invariably turn a blind eye to some of the horrible lines of the "greats". You make concessions for them because they've written so much material that is well-known or widely loved. For instance, take Keats' famous "Ode On A Grecian Urn". We forgive Keats a line such as,

     "More happy love! more happy, happy love!"

simply because he later knocks us out with,

     "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all
          Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

But imagine if one of us were to have a line like the first one in a workshopped poem? We'd be harangued right off the site and ridiculed long after!

Point being: don't judge a poet too harshly for a less-than-stellar body of work. There are indeed many modern poets who have outraged me with their vacuous, meaningless, formless lines passed off as profound poems, but it's a slippery slope to charge the poets themselves as being "good bad" poets...or even "bad bad" poets. Orwell's one of my favorite authors, but I'm not willing to go quite so far as he did in terms of categorization.

I must support Wendy; Hood is just plain good. (Good Lord, in my indignation I have emitted a semi-colon.) Of course, Marcia, you can find the occasional uncooked line or two, as he was a working journalist hard-pressed by deadlines and his verse had to put food on the table. For me, 'The Bridge of Sighs' takes the crude popular street ballad, which was still alive in his day, to the stratosphere, as it were. There are fragments of a longer version he either had no time to complete, or discarded, and he might have removed or revised the lines you object to. However, it seems to me the total effect is tremendous, as well as individual 'simple' but powerful passages like

The bleak wind of March
Made her trembleand shiver;
But not the dark arch
Or the black flowing river;

I think Gregory is spot on with the legacy of his comic punning verse to the protest and other more 'serious' poems, as in the almost Shakespearian brooding swallows that twit the sempstress with the spring and (in the earlier Ode To Melancholy)

Like the sweet blossoms of the May,
Whose fragrance ends in must.

Noel Coward? I hope your lightning-conductor is in good order!

It was Orwell, Jan. Here's a passage from the essay:

My profound thanks for Orwell's essay, Gregory! I feel inspired to respond with:

[Original bad poem moved to the appropriate Drills and Amusements thread, after I realized that this was the Musing on Mastery forum--oops! ]

Sorry, Marcia -- I'll stick with Gregory & Jerome et. al. on Hood: a writer of highly effective, serious social poems. No small thing.

Thanks for the Orwell essay, Jan & Gregory. So ... it seems the "good/bad" poem expresses a so-called "vulgar" thought (i.e., one common to everyone) with too much sentimentality -- but nonetheless does so effectively.

What makes it bad then, exactly, seems to be BOTH:

(1) that the thought/emotion expressed is (allegedly) "vulgar", because universally shared
(that part's a bit hard to swallow); and

(2) that the expression is too sentimental. Well, sure, who wants to be too sentimental -- though the Victorians clearly had a higher threshhold of pain where sentimentality's concerned ...

Reminds me of Oscar Wilde's comment on Dickens -- something like, who could read the death scene of Little Nell without ... laughing his head off! Still, Dickens did fine, right? Not a good/bad writer, would you say? Or, who was the better writer, anyway -- Dickens or Wilde? Can anyone say? Does it even matter?

Seems like this "good/bad" thing is just a hangover from the general artistic reaction against Victorian sentimentality.

Yeah, I can say. Dickens was the better writer. It's not even close, is it?