[Gregory Dowling]

In an essay on Rudyard Kipling (still one of the best things ever written on him), George Orwell used the term “good bad poetry”, to describe such works as “Gunga Din” and “Danny Deever”. He said that:

Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could not get any pleasure out of such lines as:

For the wind is in the palm trees and the temple bells they say,
‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’

I don’t know how useful a term “good bad poetry” is, but I guess we all know what he means by it. I am wondering what other examples people might like to propose. (I would say that Kipling no longer needs any special pleading.) Or to put it in another way, are there poets (or just individual poems) that people here secretly and perhaps rather shamefacedly enjoy?

I’ll come straight out and say I’ve always enjoyed a number of poems by Sir Henry Newbolt. Take a poem like "He Fell Among Thieves". I can see all the faults in it: the sentimental picture of England, the tendency to fall back on clichéd images – but at the same time I enjoy the narrative vigour of the versification and the colourful use of the exotic setting and place-names. There are other poems of his, like "Vitai Lampada", that are clearly as unpolitically correct as you could get, but which nonetheless have an uncanny quality of memorability; part of it is the way he manages to create a setting and an ethos with a strict economy of details (“A bumping pitch and a blinding light, / An hour to play and the last man in…”). If nothing else, these poems have power as historical documents, giving us an insight into the imperialist mentality (though perhaps that’s a rather cheap line of defence).

Anyway, I’d like to hear other people’s confessions, so if you’ve always got a sneaking enjoyment out of some totally unfashionable names like W.E. Henley or Sabine Baring-Gould or John Greenleaf Whittier, now’s the time to come out and declare it boldly. Here could even be your chance to stand up for Rod McKuen or Pam Ayres.