The Germ, Vol.1
Bad love poems and teenage pontification

The Germ was a terrible magazine that ran for 4 issues in 1850. Written by mopey boyband/art movement the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the magazine was edited by William Michael Rossetti, and featured awful poems, saccharine monologues, and art theory by himself, his brother and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the sculptor Thomas Woolner and a few of their friends. So why should you read The Germ? Because there is no better reminder that a few love-lorn teens with strong opinions can actually create art that lasts for 100s of years. So get out there, write some poems! You’ll have to try pretty hard to make something worse than these guys.