Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay

William Topaz McGonagall is notoriously the worst poet in the English language, and 'The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay' is his magnum opus of magnificently bad verse. Written to celebrate the Tay Rail Bridge upon its opening in 1878, this poem gushes with such earnest, clumsy devotion that readers find themselves caught between admiration and helpless laughter. The bridge would collapse a year later, killing 75 passengers, which McGonagall would later memorialize in his infamous companion poem. But here, in this celebration of Victorian engineering, we get McGonagall at his most gloriously unguarded: lines that stumble, rhythms that lurch, and sentiment deployed like a sledgehammer. There's something almost heroic in his obliviousness. This is poetry as pure spectacle, the literary equivalent of a train wreck you can't look away from. Anyone seeking to understand why bad art fascinates us need look no further.