biography
| name: |
McGonagall, William
|
pronunciation:
[muhgonagl]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1830–1902)
|
| biography:
| Scottish poet and novelist, the son of an immigrant Irish weaver. He spent some of his childhood in the Orkneys, and in Dundee. He did some acting at Dundee's Royal Theatre, and in 1877 began to write poems, the best-known of which is ‘The Tay Bridge Disaster’ (1880). From then on he travelled in C Scotland, giving readings and selling his poetry in broadsheets, and was lionized by the legal and student fraternity. His poems are uniformly bad, but possess a disarming innocence and a calypso-like disregard for metre which still never fail to entertain. |
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