In defence of the worst poem ever written

It’s the Plan Nine From Outer Space of the poetry world. Remember that Monty Python sketch about a joke so funny it could never be told for fear of harming the listener? This poem is like that.
It’s a poem (and a poet) that few actually know, but nearly everyone has heard some variation, some parody or song or take on it.
It’s Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”, and I’m here to tell you that it is the worst poem ever written. But that doesn’t mean Kilmer was the worst poet. Nor does it mean we should forget it. In fact, it’s important to remember.
First, it’s not just me saying it’s the worst. It really is the worst. It is held up in popular culture and academia as the most over sentimental, most archaic, most painfully traditional English poem ever written. I know you have heard this poem. Here’s the first lines:

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast

There is so much wrong with this poem’s imagery, its meter and its personification of earth’s breast feeding the tree its life. Kilmer concludes that “Poems are made by fools like me, / But only God can make a tree.” The poem was a giant hit in when it was first published in 1914. Kilmer gained instant fame and notoriety. The criticism also began almost immediately, with other poets like Ogden Nash penning parodies. Everyone from Our Gang to Victor Borge to Walt Disney got in the act. The poem was set to song, put in musicals and repeated in universities as the example of what a good poem should not be.
And what did Mr. Kilmer have to say about all this? Not much. He was killed by a sniper in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 at the age of 31.
Of course, there’s a point to all this. I lived in New Jersey for a while. (Come on, it wasn’t that bad!) If you spend more than 20 minutes in New Jersey you are likely to wonder just who the hell this Kilmer guy is. Alfred Joyce Kilmer was born in Jersey. There’s a museum there, his birth house, a bunch of schools named after him and some buildings on Rutgers University. Most importantly, there is a Rest Stop along the Jersey Turnpike named in his honor. In New Jersey, that’s the equivalent of being crowded king in most eastern European countries.
But that’s not all. He has a park and a square in Brooklyn, a memorial in St. Paul, an intersection in Chicago, and a Memorial Forest in North Carolina.
He also has an annual Bad Poetry contest named after him at Columbia University.
Ed Wood does not have any intersections named after him.
So, how does the worst poet ever (or eveh for you Jersey readers) get such respect, not to mention naming rights? There’s a few reasons for this. First, Kilmer isn’t defined by that one poem. He was a powerful literary critic and lecturer. He was a brilliant journalist. In fact, it’s one of the reasons he died. He went to France to write about the war. Had he not died, he may have had the time to overshadow that one poem.
Second, he was also a deeply faithful man. At the time, he was known as the poet laureate of the Catholic Church. I’m not saying faith makes you a better poet. But maybe, sometimes, it’s not that bad just being a sentimentalist. Like his poem or not, Kilmer was earnest, he wrote what he felt.
Finally and here’s the real point, there was a time when it was ok to be a poet. The guy was a soldier. His oratory skills were compared to G.K. Chesterton. In other words he was no pantywaist, and yet, he wrote the most simplistic, overwrought poem of all time. And they still named a Rest Stop after him.