The Famous Tay Whale Dundee city centre. Paul Godfrey described McGonagall on the strength of the "Tay Whale" and other verse as "the worst poet in the English language". Hugh MacDiarmid wrote of the "Tay Whale" that "what this [the verses about John Wood and the Tay Whale] amounts to, of course, is simply what quite uneducated and stupid people—the two adjectives by no means necessarily go together, for many uneducated people have great vitality and a raciness of utterance altogether lacking here—would produce if asked to recount something they had read in a newspaper." MacDiarmid continued that "in their retailings of, or comments
The Tay Bridge Disaster by far the most famous ever written by McGonagall, and is still widely quoted. It begins: And it ends: William McGonagall wrote two other poems about the Tay bridges. The first one, written before the disaster about the first bridge, begins as follows: The Railway Bridge of the Silvery Tay: And it ends: After the original bridge collapsed, a new one was built, providing the opportunity for another poem, which begins: An Address to the New Tay Bridge The Tay Bridge Disaster "The Tay Bridge Disaster" is a poem written in 1880 by the Scottish poet William McGonagall, who has