[3] While poetaster has always been a negative appraisal of a poet's skills, rhymester (or rhymer) and versifier have held ambiguous meanings depending on the commentator's opinion of a writer's verse.
Versifier is often used to refer to someone who produces work in verse with the implication that while technically able to make lines rhyme they have no real talent for poetry.
[citation needed] The faults of a poetaster frequently include errors or lapses in their work's meter, badly rhyming words which jar rather than flow, oversentimentality, too much use of the pathetic fallacy and unintentionally bathetic choice of subject matter.
Other poets often regarded as poetasters are William Topaz McGonagall, Julia A. Moore, Edgar Guest, J. Gordon Coogler, Dmitry Khvostov, and Alfred Austin.
[6] Musician Joanna Newsom on the album The Milk-eyed Mender uses the term to refer to a struggling narrator wracked with ambition to create beautiful poetry in a verse from "Inflammatory Writ": Rapper Big Daddy Kane uses an adjectival form as an insult in his song "Uncut, Pure": The band Miracle Fortress has a song entitled "Poetaster".