Echoes in Eternity

Dalrymple wrote an interesting column this week about William McGonagall, who is apparently known as the "worst poet in the English language." I've never heard of him, but it seems he was quite delusional in his self-estimation, comparing himself to Shakespeare even. The article costs $3 to read in its entirety, but it is a well-spent $3 in my opinion. Here's a small snippet:

No matter how much ridicule or even physical abuse McGonagall suffered from his audiences, he never lost faith in himself and always found an explanation for it that allowed him to preserve his self-respect. (On one occasion, ill-treatment stimulated his muse there and then: “Gentlemen, if you please,/ Stop throwing peas.”) It was this psychological armor-plating that limited the effects of the cruelty of his audiences, but it was cruelty, and gross cruelty, nonetheless. There is nothing, after all, to suggest that McGonagall was other than harmless and even kindly. It was a nineteenth-century equivalent of paying to see the lunatics in Bedlam, and now, when I laugh so heartily at McGonagall’s verses, I feel that I am participating in this unfeeling cruelty. Even if the deluded are happy, you do not laugh at their delusions, for there is something intrinsically pitiable about the quality of being deluded.

A world that did not laugh at his verse, however, or refused to enjoy itself with them out of supersensitivity to his memory would be a horrible world too. Only a man with a heart of stone, said Oscar Wilde, could read the death of Little Nell without laughing; only someone with the most frightening self-control could read the following lines, from “The Wreck of the Whaler ‘Oscar,’” with a straight face, or wish them expunged altogether from the human record: “’Twas on the 1st of April, and in the year Eighteen thirteen/ That the whaler ‘Oscar’ was wrecked not far from Aberdeen.” So on the one hand cruelty, and on the other the human necessity to laugh: an irresolvable antinomy of almost Kantian proportions.