Poetaster, rhymester or versifier are contemptuous names often applied to bad or inferior poets.

The original poetasters were John Marston and Thomas Dekker as this was the name given to a 1601 play by Ben Jonson—the first to use the word in print—lampooning these two writers. John Marston (October 7, 1576 - June 25, 1634) was an English poet, playwright and satirist during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. ... Thomas Dekker, (c. ... Events February 8 - Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, rebels against Elizabeth I of England - revolt is quickly crushed February 25 - Robert Devereux beheaded Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrives in China Bad harvest in Russia due to rainy summer Dutch troops drive Portuguese from Málaga Battle of Kinsale, Ireland Births... Benjamin Jonson (June 11, 1572 – August 6, 1637) was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. ...

While poetaster has always been a negative appraisal of a poet's skills, rhymester (or rhymer) and versifier have held an 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 always impolite despite attempts to salvage the reputation of rhymers such as the Rhymers' Club and Rhymer being a common last name. Verse is a writing that uses meter as its primary organisational mode, as opposed to prose, which uses grammatical and discoursal units like sentences and paragraphs. ... The Rhymers Club was a group of London-based poets, founded in 1890 by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys. ...

The faults of a poetaster frequently include errors or lapses in their work's meter, badly rhyming words which jar rather than flow, over sentimentality, 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 the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes by Thomas Gray others merely produce bizarre poems on bizarre subjects. A good/bad example being James McIntyre who wrote mainly of cheese. The metre, or meter (symbol: m) is the SI base unit of length. ... The pathetic fallacy is a term from literary criticism used to denote the description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations and feelings. ... Bathos is unintended humor caused by an incongruous combination of high and low. ... On First Looking into Chapmans Homer is a sonnet by English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821), written in October 1816. ... John Keats John Keats (October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) was one of the principal poets in the English Romantic movement. ... Thomas Gray (December 26, 1716 – July 30, 1771), English poet, classical scholar, and professor of history at Cambridge University. ... James McIntyre (1827-1906), called The Cheese Poet, was a Canadian poet. ...

Two other poets often regarded as poetasters are William Topaz McGonagall and Alfred Austin. The latter was actually the British poet laureate but is nevertheless regarded as greatly inferior to his predecessor Alfred Lord Tennyson, was regularly mocked during his career and is little read today. Listen to this article · (info) This audio file was created from the revision dated 2005-08-17, and does not reflect subsequent edits to the article. ... Alfred Austin (1835 - 1913) was an English poet. ... A Poet Laureate is a poet officially appointed by a government and often expected to compose poems for state occasions and other government events. ... Lord Tennyson, Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (August 6, 1809 - October 6, 1892) is generally regarded as one of the greatest English poets. ...