In the early modern "culture of slander," for instance, rhymed verse so frequently served as a vehicle for slander that "defamation" was "increasingly associated with poetry." In such eras, insult verse represents a major genre in English-language poetry as well as a challenge to many high-minded justifications of the art.
Few contemporary print-based poets, though, write insult verse. In a historical moment when a certain mode dominates poetry, namely, lyric characterized by meditative sensitivity, it is easy to forget how many of the language’s canonical authors—including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Pope, Dryden, and Yeats—wrote scabrous, mean-spirited verse. If "[p]oetry of bad personal feeling, insult, revenge" is "central to the art," hip-hop artists, not contemporary poets, claim the center.
A quintessential and very NSFW example above.
The Dish 