The Desert Mermaid

I love how poetry used to be full of snippy snarking at rivals or enemies. While the Dome of Florence was being constructed, a rival of the primary architect wrote a nasty sonnet about how the architect was an imbecile whose plans were going to fail. The architect retaliated with a sonnet basically saying "you better burn your poems because they're gonna look really stupid when everything's done!" (The poems in question can be found here.)