Very Bad Poetry

dominating influence over it, and that the art of such tribes as most
strongly show its effect has never had what may be termed its natural
phase of development, but has reached the conventional stage without
having passed through the intermediate imitative era. It is more natural
to suppose, so far, at least as the North American Indians are
concerned, that the road to conventionalism has always led through
imitation. The argument, therefore, that because a tribe or people is
less given than another to conventional methods of art, it therefore
must necessarily be in a higher stage of culture, is entitled to much
less weight than it has sometimes received. Squier and Davis, for
instance, referring to the Mound-Builders, state that "many of these
(_i.e._, sculptures) exhibit a close observance of nature such as we
could only expect to find among a people considerably advanced in the
minor arts, and to which the elaborate and laborious, but usually clumsy
and ungraceful, not to say unmeaning, productions of the savage can
claim but a slight approach." It is clearly not the intention of the
above authors to claim an entire absence of the grotesque method of
treatment in specimens of the Mound-Builder's art, since elsewhere they
call attention to what appears to be a caricature of the human face, as
well as to the disproportionate size of the heads of many of the animal
carvings. Not only are the heads of many of the carvings of
disproportionate size, which, in instances has the effect of actual
distortion, but in not a few of the sculptures nature, instead of being
copied, has been trifled with and birds and animals show peculiarities
unknown to science and which go far to prove that the Mound-Builders,
however else endowed, possessed lively imaginations and no little
creative fancy. Decided traces of conventionalism also

Mao Meow has published 2 more terrible poems since joining on 30/11/99. Read more of Mao's terrible poetry at the anthology. Here are three of Mao's latest works: