Publisher sent the most brutal assessment of a poem. Aspiring poet had the perfect response ready.

For aspiring authors, putting their work out for submission can be scary. Often, their work is just stowed away in a corner of discarded manuscripts and a postman rings their house doorbell carrying a rejection letter. Usually, all rejection letters are supposed to hit harshly to the writer or poet who is trying to learn and produce new work. But no letter can compare the brutality that drips from this particular rejected letter from October 1928. A snapshot of the printed vintage letter was first shared on X by Letters of Note (@lettersofnote) in December 2017 and it has been viewed by thousands of people ever since.

The jarring letter was addressed to an aspiring poet named F.C. Meyer, a resident of Walls Street, Katoomba. The rejection note was signed by Australian publishing house Angus & Robertson Ltd., a major publisher in the Australian book industry for over 100 years. In a precise yet pitiless manner, the letter read: “Dear Sir, No you may not send us your verses, and we will not give you the name of another publisher. We hate no rival publisher sufficiently to ask you to inflict them on him. The specimen poem is simply awful. In fact, we have never seen worse.”

Letters of Note described the painful rejection letter with the caption, “All other rejection letters can step down. We have a winner.” They revealed that a person named Kylie Parkinson had sent them the letter via Facebook. On X, @sooccasionnow commented on the letter saying, “One wonders how one could ever step up from this #rejection?” @annehawkinson said, “It’s cutting.” Many people expressed their comments with an “Ouch!”

A letter like this would sting the receiving writer so much that they wouldn’t be able to write anything anymore, but Meyer was undeterred. He remained persistent and went on to publish his poems and writings all by himself. Only a year followed by this rejection letter, in 1929, he published a collection titled, “Pearls of the Blue Mountains of Australia” and another book called “Jewels of Mountains and Snowlines of New Zealand” in 1934, per Bustle. No one knows how well his books did in the market. But according to Pauline Conolly, he didn’t receive a review until December 29, 1935, when a Sydney newspaper The Sun printed one, under the heading, “Native Woodnotes.”

Angus & Robertson were not the only ones who brutally rejected Meyer’s poems. It seems, Meyer was officially certified as a bad poet. In 2001, his poetry was quoted in a series about “Poet Nauseate” candidates, a negative version of the Poet Laureate, per a Scoop article. Extracts from his poems were included in a "bad verse and awful poetry competition" held by New Zealand magazine Artscape. They labeled Meyer as "the finest bad poet this country has produced."

One of the verses quoted in the magazine was from "Maori Maiden." It reads: "I think -- I understand thee well, Rub my nose now for a spell!" Another was from "My Pet Dog" which reads: "Pluto! come here my dearest little dog, Don't get mixed up with every rogue, And do not run into a fog...." Currently, The State Library of New South Wales holds a signed copy of his books in its collection, according to a Facebook post by the library.