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28-503: Poetaster is a late Elizabethan satirical comedy written by Ben Jonson that was first performed in 1601 . The play formed one element in the back-and-forth exchange between Jonson and his rivals John Marston and Thomas Dekker in the so-called Poetomachia or War of the Theatres of 1599–1601. Poetaster was entered into the Stationers' Register on 21 December 1601, and

56-578: A British poet laureate , is nevertheless regarded as greatly inferior to his predecessor, Alfred Lord Tennyson . Austin was frequently mocked during his career and is little read today. The American poet Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918), known for his 1913 poem "Trees" , is often criticized for his overly sentimental and traditional verse written at the dawn of Modernist poetry , although some of his poems are frequently anthologized and retain enduring popular appeal. "Trees" has been parodied innumerable times, including by Ogden Nash . Musician Joanna Newsom on

84-406: A broad range of particular connections between Poetaster, other Jonson works, and plays by other authors in the first years of the 17th century. The term poetaster , meaning an inferior poet with pretensions to artistic value, had been coined by Erasmus in 1521. It was used by Jonson in 1600 and then popularised with this play a year later. Poetaster While poetaster has always been

112-419: A negative appraisal of a poet's skills, rhymester (or rhymer ) and versifier have held ambiguous meanings depending on the commentator's opinion of a writer's verse . Versifier is often used to refer to someone who produces work in verse with the implication that while technically able to make lines rhyme they have no real talent for poetry. Rhymer on the other hand is usually impolite. The faults of

140-485: A parasite or sycophant, in his play Parasitaster, or The Fawn (1604). Later in the 17th century (the earliest cited use is from 1684) appeared the term criticaster for an inferior and pretentious critic. Julia A. Moore Julia Ann Moore (née Julia Ann Davis ; December 1, 1847 – June 5, 1920) was an American poetaster . Like Scotland's William McGonagall , she is best known for writing notoriously bad poetry. Young Julia grew up on her family's Michigan farm,

168-409: A poetaster frequently include errors or lapses in their work's meter, badly rhyming words which jar rather than flow, oversentimentality, too much use of the pathetic fallacy and unintentionally bathetic choice of subject matter. Although a mundane subject in the hands of some great poets can be raised to the level of art, such as On First Looking into Chapman's Homer by John Keats or Ode on

196-433: A small store and, over the years, bore ten children, of whom six survived to adulthood. She continued to write poetry and songs. Moore's first book of verse, The Sentimental Song Book , was published in 1876 by C. M. Loomis of Grand Rapids , and quickly went into a second printing. A copy ended up in the hands of James F. Ryder, a Cleveland publisher, who republished it under the title The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes

224-503: A well. They got him out and emptied him;      Alas it was too late; His spirit was gone for to sport aloft      In the realms of the good and great. is not far removed from Moore's poems on subjects like Little Libbie : One more little spirit to Heaven has flown,      To dwell in that mansion above, Where dear little angels, together roam,      In God's everlasting love. Moore

252-503: A whole houseful of fools. Afterwards, her husband forbade her to publish any more poetry. Three more poems were eventually published, and she would write poems for friends. In 1880, she also published, in newspaper serialization, a short story, "Lost and Found", a strongly moralistic story about a drunkard, and a novella, "Sunshine and Shadow", a peculiar romance set in the American Revolution . The ending of "Sunshine and Shadow"

280-571: Is worth making. Unlike McGonagall, Moore commanded a fairly wide variety of meters and forms, albeit like Emily Dickinson the majority of her verse is in the ballad meter. Like McGonagall, she held a maidenly bluestocking 's allegiance to the Temperance movement , and frequently indited odes to the joys of sobriety. Most importantly, like McGonagall, she was drawn to themes of accident , disaster , and sudden death; as has been said of A. E. Housman 's A Shropshire Lad , in her pages you can count

308-448: The Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes by Thomas Gray , others merely produce bizarre poems on bizarre subjects, an example being James McIntyre , who wrote mainly of cheese. Other poets often regarded as poetasters are William Topaz McGonagall , Julia A. Moore , Edgar Guest , J. Gordon Coogler , Dmitry Khvostov , and Alfred Austin . Austin, despite having been

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336-660: The Public . Ryder sent out numerous review copies to newspapers across the country, with a cover letter filled with low-key mock praise. And so Moore received national attention. Following Ryder's lead, contemporary reviews were amusedly negative. The Rochester Democrat wrote of Sweet Singer that Shakespeare, could he read it, would be glad that he was dead …. If Julia A. Moore would kindly deign to shed some of her poetry on our humble grave, we should be but too glad to go out and shoot ourselves tomorrow. The Hartford Daily Times said that to meet such steady and unremitting demands on

364-403: The U.S. throughout the mid-19th century. Moore gave a reading and singing performance, with orchestral accompaniment, in 1877 at a Grand Rapids opera house. She somehow misinterpreted the jeering of the audience as criticism of the orchestra. Moore's second collection, A Few Choice Words to the Public , appeared in 1878, but found few buyers. Moore gave a second public performance in late 1878 at

392-446: The album The Milk-eyed Mender uses the term to refer to a struggling narrator wracked with ambition to create beautiful poetry in a verse from "Inflammatory Writ": Rapper Big Daddy Kane uses an adjectival form as an insult in his song "Uncut, Pure": The band Miracle Fortress has a song entitled "Poetaster". In the sense that a poetaster is a pretended poet, John Marston coined the term parasitaster, for one who pretends to be

420-545: The dead and wounded. Edgar Wilson Nye called her "worse than a Gatling gun ". Here, she is inspired by the Great Chicago Fire : The great Chicago Fire, friends,      Will never be forgot; In the history of Chicago      It will remain a darken spot. It was a dreadful horrid sight      To see that City in flames; But no human aid could save it,      For all skill

448-454: The eldest of four children. When she was ten, her mother became ill, and Julia assumed many of her mother's responsibilities. Her formal education was thereby limited. In her mid-teens, she started writing poetry and songs, mostly in response to the death of children she knew, but any newspaper account of disaster could inspire her. At age 17, she married Frederick Franklin Moore, a farmer. Julia ran

476-436: The lachrymal ducts one must be provided, as Sam Weller suspected Job Trotter was, 'with a main, as is allus let on.'… The collection became a curious best-seller, though it is unclear whether this was due to public amusement with Moore's poetry or genuine appreciation of the admittedly " sentimental " character of her poems. It was, more or less, the last gasp of that school of obituary poetry that had been broadly popular in

504-450: The occasional reporter trying to revisit the past. They were a successful business couple, he with an orchard and sawmill, she with a store. Her husband died in 1914. The next year, Julia republished "Sunshine and Shadow" in pamphlet form. She spent much of her widowhood "melancholy", sitting on her porch. She died quietly in 1920. The news of her death was widely reported, sometimes with a light touch. Some comparison to William McGonagall

532-601: The play with historical and literary figures of the era, including George Chapman and Shakespeare — though these arguments have not been accepted by the scholarly consensus. It is generally argued that the play is more than a mere venting of personal spleen against two rivals; rather, Jonson attempted in Poetaster to express his views on "the poet's moral duties in society." The play has been considered "an attempt to combine undramatic, philosophical material on good poets with satire on bad poets." Scholars have also traced out

560-467: The quarto, the title is Poetaster or The Arraignment, and in the folio, Poetaster, Or His Arraignment. The principal character in the play is Ovid . It is widely accepted among scholars and critics that the character of Horace in Poetaster represents Jonson himself, while Crispinus, who vomits up a pretentious and bombastic vocabulary, is Marston, and Demetrius Fannius is Dekker. Individual commentators have attempted to identify other characters in

588-485: The red ribbon brigade,      Among the drunkard crew." Despite her acknowledgment that "Literary is a work very difficult to do," she did not approve of the life of Byron : The character of "Lord Byron"      Was of a low degree, Caused by his reckless conduct,      And bad company. He sprung from an ancient house,      Noble, but poor, indeed. His career on earth,

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616-445: The same opera house. By then she had figured out that the praise directed to her was false and the jeering sincere. She began by admitting her poetry was "partly full of mistakes" and that "literary is a work very hard to do". After the poetry and the laughter and jeering in response was over, Moore ended the show by telling the audience: You have come here and paid twenty-five cents to see a fool; I receive seventy-five dollars, and see

644-621: Was also the inspiration for comic poet Ogden Nash , as he acknowledged in his first book, and whose daughter reported that her work convinced Nash to become a "great bad poet" instead of a "bad good poet". The Oxford Companion to American Literature describes Nash as using Moore's hyperdithyrambic meters, pseudo-poetic inversions, gangling asymmetrical lines, extremely pat or elaborately inexact rimes, parenthetical dissertations, and unexpected puns. Selections of Moore appeared in D. B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee 's Stuffed Owl anthology, and in other collections of bad poetry. Most of her poetry

672-682: Was first published in quarto in 1602 by the bookseller Matthew Lownes. The title page of the first edition states that the play was performed by the Children of the Chapel , one of the companies of boy actors popular at the time. The play was next published in the first folio collection of Jonson's works ( 1616 ). A prefatory note to the folio text identifies the main actors in the 1601 production as Nathan Field , John Underwood , Salomon Pavy, William Ostler , Thomas Day, and Thomas Marton. The quarto and folio texts both supply subtitles, with slight variants: in

700-760: Was marred      By his own misdeeds. Mark Twain was a self-described fan of Moore (though not for the reasons Moore would have liked). Twain alluded to her work in Following the Equator , and it is widely assumed that Moore served as a literary model for the character of Emmeline Grangerford in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Grangerford's funereal ode to Stephen Dowling Botts: O no. Then list with tearful eye,      Whilst I his fate do tell.  His soul did from this cold world fly      By falling down

728-449: Was perhaps intended to be self-referential: the farmer facing foreclosure is gratefully rescued by his wife's publishing her secret cache of fiction. According to some reports, though, her husband was not grateful, but embarrassed. Shamed or not, he moved the family 100 miles north to Manton in 1882. Moore's notoriety was known in Manton, but the locals respected her, and did not cooperate with

756-818: Was reprinted in a 1928 edition, which can be found online. Her complete poetry and prose, with biography, notes, and references, can be found in the Riedlinger edited collection Mortal Refrains . Most poetry collections reprint the latest, "best", versions of their contents. Riedlinger has adopted the opposite philosophy. Moore has been grouped into the Western Michigan School of Bad Versemakers. Her local contemporaries — including Dr. William Fuller, S.H. Ewell, J.B. Smiley, and Fred Yapple — do not appear to have had relationships with each other, but their proximity and similar penchant for exceptionally laughable verse have led to their posthumous grouping together. Since 1994,

784-403: Was tried in vain. Her less morbid side is on display when she hymns Temperance Reform Clubs : Many a man joined the club      That never drank a drachm, Those noble men were kind and brave      They care not for the slang -- The slang they meet on every side:      "You're a reform drunkard, too; You've joined

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