Erm, it's a genuine attempt to honour the life of a man held in great affection by many people.
Without a doubt, McGonagall was the best bad poet ever to have graced the English language. There's acres of bad poetry out there - very little of it can install a feeling of genuine delight in the way McGonagall can. It may well be that McGonagall managed to transcend mere badness through the the sheer amount of will he placed into achieving cognitive dissonance. It's pretty clear from contemporary sources that he genuinely believed himself to be the second finest poet in the English language. McGonagall wasn't a poet, but he was an artist. His own life was his medium and his artwork rolled into one.
Which is a very long winded and pretentious way of saying that what he did was both admirable and entertaining, even if it wasn't poetry.
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