While
poetaster has always been a negative appraisal of a poet's skills,
rhymester (or
rhymer) and
versifier have held 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 impolite. The faults of a poetaster frequently include errors or lapses in their work's meter, badly rhyming words which jar rather than flow, oversentimentality, 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, an example being
James McIntyre, who wrote mainly of cheese. Other poets often regarded as poetasters are
William Topaz McGonagall,
Julia A. Moore,
Edgar Guest,
J. Gordon Coogler,
Dmitry Khvostov, and
Alfred Austin. Austin, despite having been a British
poet laureate, is nevertheless regarded as greatly inferior to his predecessor,
Alfred Lord Tennyson. Austin was frequently mocked during his career and is little read today. The American poet
Joyce Kilmer (1886–1918), known for his 1913 poem
"Trees", is often criticized for his overly sentimental and traditional verse written at the dawn of
Modernist poetry, although some of his poems are frequently anthologized and retain enduring popular appeal. "Trees" has been parodied innumerable times, including by
Ogden Nash. == Modern use ==