For aspiring writers, putting their work out for publication can be a scary experience. Often times, their work is simply tucked away in a corner among discarded manuscripts and a postman rings their doorbell with a rejection letter. Typically, all rejection letters are meant to hit hard at the writer or poet trying to learn and create new work. But no letter can compare to the brutality dripping 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 has since been viewed by thousands of people.
The shocking letter was addressed to an aspiring poet named FC Meyer, who lived in Walls Street, Katoomba. The rejection letter was signed by the Australian publisher Angus & Robertson Ltd., a major publisher in the Australian book industry for over 100 years. In precise but ruthless terms, the letter read: “Dear Sir, no, you must not send us your verses, nor will we give you the name of any other publisher. We hate no rival publisher so much that we would ask you to impose these verses on them. The model poem is simply awful. In fact, we have never seen anything worse.”
Letters of Note described the painful rejection letter with the caption, “All other rejection letters can resign. We have a winner.” They revealed that a person named Kylie Parkinson sent them the letter via Facebook. On X, @sooccasionnow commented on the letter, saying, “Makes you wonder how you’ll ever get over this #rejection?” @annehawkinson said, “It’s cutting.” Many people commented on their comments with an “Ouch!”
A letter like this would hurt the recipient so much that they would be unable to write anything more, but Meyer was undeterred. He persisted and published his poems and writings on his own. Just a year after that rejection letter, in 1929, he published a collection called “Pearls of the Blue Mountains of Australia,” according to Bustle, and another book in 1934 called “Jewels of Mountains and Snowlines of New Zealand.” No one knows how well his books fared in the market. But according to Pauline Conolly, he didn’t receive a review until December 29, 1935, when Sydney newspaper The Sun printed one under the headline “Native Woodnotes.”
Angus & Robertson were not the only ones to brutally reject Meyer’s poems. It seems that Meyer was officially classified as a bad poet. In 2001, his poems were cited in a series about candidates for the “Poet Nauseate,” a negative version of the Poet Laureate, according to a Scoop article. Extracts from his poems were entered into a “bad verse and terrible poetry competition” held by New Zealand magazine Artscape. They called Meyer “the best bad poet this country has produced.”
One of the lines quoted in the magazine was from “Maori Maiden.” It reads: “I think – I understand you well. Rub my nose a while now!” Another was from “My Pet Dog” and reads: “Pluto! Come here, my darling little dog. Don’t mess with every rogue, and don’t run into the fog…” According to a Facebook post from the library, the State Library of New South Wales currently has a signed copy of his books in its collection.
