The greatest writer ever:

William McGonnagall (no relation to the professor of Transfiguration, as far as I know). He was a Scottish "poet" from the late 19th century, most famous for his masterpiece "The Tay Bridge Disaster," which begins as follows:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

What's amazing is the unpredictability. After the inspired rhymes of "Tay" with "say" and "away," you might expect the next line to end in something like "day." That's where he gets you. Although that word does appear, it is NOT where the gentle reader might expect it to be. He jogs right past the too-few-syllables-into-the-line expected rhyme and straight to the ending date. The effect is rather like slipping on a pile of dog shit and smashing your head into a brick wall, or perhaps flying off the end of a broken railway bridge into an icy river. The former is more accurate, the latter perhaps more the author's intention. Maybe.

The poem (his masterpiece, although his other 199 or so published poems all have their moments of genius) continues on for another 7 stanzas, full of great sequences like:

And the passengers' hearts felt light,
Thinking they would enjoy themselves on the New Year,
With their friends at home they lov'd most dear,
And wish them all a happy New Year.

The crowning glory, however, is unquestionably the final stanza.

Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Despite the creative uses of "lay" and "confesses," the genius of this lies in, again, the devious rhyme scheme. After "Tay," "lay," "dismay," "way," and "say" all coming one after another like a machine gun of rhyme fired straight into the brain of the reader, one might expect "day" to come up again in a cleverly-placed internal rhyme . Yet again, McGonnagall fails to conform to our naive hopes. What we get instead, in a glorious display of creativity, is "buttresses," a word which perhaps no other poet would have the gall to use in any poem, let alone one in which it so blatantly flouts the already precariously variable meter and rhyme.



Seriously, though, I can't stop giggling when I read his stuff. There's an archive of everything he ever wrote here. Enjoy!