Friederike Kempner occupies a unique place in nineteenth-century German literature through being a bad poet. Her poems are so bad that they are hilariously funny. Kempner has been dubbed "der schlesische Schwan" (the Silesian Swan), "die schlesische Nachtigall" (the Silesian Nightingale), and "das Genie der unfreiwilligen Komik" (the Genius of Involuntary Humor). She is regarded as the archetype of the dilettante poet who naively brutalizes grammar, rhyme, and logic in a dogged attempt to bless the world with his or her message. Written in the latter half of the nineteenth century, one of the less original periods of lyric production in German literature, her poems can also be read as caricatures of the imitative, clichéd, and pompously tendentious lyrics of the post-Romantic and post-Goethe era. Convinced of her calling to art, Kempner never intended her poems to be travesties. She seemed totally unaware of her own...