"Drop / Dead. / Plop, flop. / Plop". Are these the closing lines of the worst poem in the world? So think the experts, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

A Tragedy by Theophile Jules-Henri Marzials "stands out as the absolute epitome of awfulness," says Kathryn Petras, editor of the book The Worst Poem Ever Written in the English Language. It is so bad, in fact, that it out-doggerels William McGonagall's notorious lament for The Tay Bridge Disaster: "And the cry rang out all o'er the town, Good Heavens! The Tay Bridge is blown down."

Now, Marzials may have had a colourful life - aesthete, eccentric, beetroot addict - but does his idiosyncratic verse really deserve this accolade?

According to Seamus Cooney and his Bad Poetry website: "To achieve memorable badness is not so easy. It has to be done innocently, by a poet unaware of his or her defects. The right combination of lofty ambition, humorless self-confidence, and crass incompetence is rare and precious..."

He offers up some suggestions of poets who fit the bill, Wordsworth and Coleridge among them. For sheer dreadfulness, Julia A Moore, "the sweet singer of Michigan", takes some beating. Try Little Susan if you don't believe me.

With National Poetry Day tomorrow celebrating the best of the art, let's wallow in the pigsty of verse today. Who would you add to the roster of wretched rhymers?