It is a matter of wanting to see the work whole - great poems, dreadful poems, trivia, whatever there is.
"I loved and admired Ralph, and wanted to please him, so when he was conscripted into the RAF during the war, I wrote him these dreadful poems".
It may be one of the most dreadful poems ever written, worthy of inclusion in "The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse," a collection that Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee published, in 1930, to universal delight.
There are others, like Stephen Spender who went so far as to write a - dreadful - poem about them: "Pylons, those pillars/Bare like nude, giant girls that/have no secret".
Contents include: "Canonize JFK Now": a piece mocking the martyrdom of Kennedy with deep, acidic sarcasm "Cunt Is a Christian Word": A dreadful two-page poem ("There is no cock as big and rough as the one your church has thrust in you") with an exquisite layout.
Nevertheless, the publication of a volume of Thomson's poetry, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems (1880), received favourable critical attention.
The land around Kali-kata was mainly swamp and the "pestilential city" was immortalised in Rudyard Kipling's poem City of Dreadful Night.
The poem ends, dark and dreadful, with Aeneas slaughtering the leader of the Rutulians, Turnus, as he begs for mercy.
(Words beginning with "al-" are spelled "all-", a kind of etymological archaeology which lends dreadful force at last to the poems' thematic word "allone").
In the elegiac poem Mid-Term Break, Heaney wrote about this dreadful episode in his young, adolescent life (he was 13).
Tennyson's poem is not, of course, a fantasy: it's a largely accurate account of an actual, and very dreadful, historical event which took place during the Battle of Balaclava.
