Pegasus Descending: A Book Of The Best Bad Verse [first edition]

Poetry. Out of print for thirty years, this hilarious and disgusting anthology is again available, complete and unexpurgated. The editors have rummaged the arsenal of English poetry for its most spectacular fizzles. They have been no respecters of persons: Sarah Taylor Shatford and Alfred Austin rub shoulders here with Milton, Keats and Wordsworth. The poems presented are absolutely sincere; no failure is faked. All infelicities are unintended. As one genius of the awful put it, "Literary is a work very difficult to do". But another, the great Edgar A. Guest, reminds us, "Sacred and sweet is the joy that must come/ From the furnace of life when you've poured off the scum". Here there is—as James Wright declared, after hearing these poems—"nothing mediocre!"