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.)