These words refer to writers of poetry or verse. Only poet , however, can now refer to such a writer in a neutral or positive way; all the others would be understood mainly as terms of disapproval. Most often, poet implies no evaluation whatsoever: a hundred had poets for every good poet , and a hundred of those for every great poet . The word is sometimes inflated as a word of vague approval: the poet who is often more acute in pinpointing sings of social malaise than the sociologist. Often this approving use need not imply a writer of any sort: a poet of the piano; housewives who bring to their work the sensitivity of a poet . Sometimes the word can be used in disapproval to contrast a flighty sort of mental outlook with a rational one: abuses of the scientific method that mark him as a poet rather than a scientist. Both approving and disapproving uses of the word may reveal more about the speaker’s possibly stereotyped notions of poetry than about poets themselves.

A distinction is sometimes made between versifier and poet , assigning to the former all attempts to write poetry and to the latter only successful attempts: modestly insisting that he was only a versifier , not a poet ; a horde of versifiers who could hardly be considered poets . This distinction is now losing ground, and versifier itself is becoming more pejorative, not in reference to an unsuccessful poet, but to someone whose conscious intention is to write trivial or light verse or to work in outmoded strict forms; this use classifies such a writer without reference to his success or failure at realizing his intentions: a facile versifier whose work appears in women’s magazines.

Bard was once an approving word for poet , but now its only conceivable use would be to poke fun at a pompous poet with an uncritical admiration for his own work: shaggy bards who recited their poems in coffee-shops. Rhymer and rhymester refer to the making of rhymes by bad versifiers ; once these terms could serve as general pejoratives for all writers of bad verse, but now that a greater proportion of poetry, both good and bad, may well be unrhymed, neither word is so inclusive in its disapproval. Both now would be severely pejorative of someone who turned out doggerel or who made wooden and unimaginative use of traditional forms; of the two, rhymester would still be left as more severely negative in tone: poems that show him to be basically a rhymer , still beating the heroic couplet to death; rhymesters who write greeting-card jingles.

Poetess was once a neutral term applying to a woman poet . Like most feminine forms (except actress, heroine, etc.), the word has gone out of fashion; most women poets would now find the term offensive, if not insulting, although many people might, without understanding this change of fashion, still use the term innocently enough. Poetaster is the most clearly pejorative of all these words and has never had any uses or connotations other than those pertaining to extreme disapproval. The word indicates insincere, affected, bad writing in verse by a person of no talent, often in imitation of prevailing styles of his day, often to at least momentary critical acclaim: poetasters who win prizes and get fellowships, while good poets go begging.