: a writer of light or inferior verse
Sampson, in my judgment, was not a "pretender to poetry" and a "mere" versifier. Rather, he has succeeded with skill in sounding her name and fame to the world: overlooked no more.
— David Bergeron, Philological Quarterly (Iowa City), Winter 2021
A versifier originally meant any poet, and to this day it's still used without slighting intent. To versify meant to write any verse, and then later, to write a treatment of something (such as tragedy) in verse form. The –ify ending to versify comes from Latin versificāre--ficāre is from facere, "to make"--and echoes other verbs of conversion, such as modify, amplify, or simplify. Occasionally this ending is used to inflate a verb with importance, such as in speechify to mean "to give a speech."
That might have been part of the reason behind the pejorative sense that versifier acquired by the time John Milton wrote, in 1642, "Rather nice and humerous in what was tolerable, then patient to read every drawling versifier."