William McGonagall

Where he was born and when are unknown, but William Topaz McGonagall was a self-educated hand loom weaver who, in Dundee in 1877, felt the poetic muse upon him. He spent the next twenty-five years appalling and delighting audiences with his disjointed, creaky and sometimes just plain bad verse. Lines on everything from great tragedies to odes to royalty and itinerant whales flowed from his pen and have been celebrated by everyone from The Muppets to Monty Python and The Goons.