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Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets

Ogden Nash

by Thomas Willard

Other literary forms

Ogden Nash’s staple was the short comic poem. He wrote hundreds of them and collected them in more than twenty books. He also wrote essays for The New Yorker and other magazines, and he collaborated with friends on a variety of enterprises, contributing to several screenplays for Hollywood and two Broadway musicals. His daughters seem to have given him ideas for children’s fiction, but he wrote for boys as often as he did for girls, and his most famous fiction, Custard the Dragon (1959), is pure fantasy. After he died, his older daughter collected the letters he had written to her and other family members during the last three decades of his life, Loving Letters from Ogden Nash: A Family Album (1990). These letters show him to have been as honest in private life as he was candid in print. Still other readers continue to collaborate with Nash as illustrators of his poems.

Ogden Nash

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(Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Achievements

During his lifetime, Ogden Nash was one of America’s best-loved humorists. Educated adults and precocious children quoted Nash much as their parents and grandparents had quoted Mark Twain, to give a distinctly American perspective on life, love, and English language. He was in many ways his own creation, for he invariably wrote in the persona of a middle-aged, middle-class American of middle income: a husband and father, a friend and neighbor, optimistic about life in general but pessimistic about the social and economic forces at work in the twentieth century. His tone was invariably urbane yet avuncular and slightly daft. Though often imitated, he was never duplicated, and his books usually sold very well. Indeed, he was so successful commercially that grudging purists claimed his light verse was not poetry at all. Other readers agreed with the poet Archibald MacLeish, who claimed, in the preface to the posthumously published I Wouldn’t Have Missed It: Selected Poems (1972), that Nash was a true poet and a master of American English. Though he never won a major literary award, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1950 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965.

Biography

Frederic Ogden Nash was born in a suburb of New York and was raised in various East Coast cities where his father’s business moved. He completed high school in Newport, Rhode Island, and spent a year at Harvard before financial pressures drove him to seek work. He held a series of jobs in New York—teaching, selling, and writing advertising copy—before landing a job in publishing with the firm of Doubleday. He began writing humorous poems in 1929, contributing them to the daily newspaper column written by Franklin P. Adams.

Nash’s light humor was a tonic for hard times, as the United States entered a decade of economic depression. In 1930, he sold his first poem to The New Yorker, averse comment on the war on “smut” recently waged by a senator named Smoot. Senator Smoot came from Utah (commonly abbreviated Ut.), but the endless stream of rhymes came from Nash. Soon he was a regular contributor to The New Yorker, where he appeared alongside great humorists such as James Thurber and S. J. Perelman. He was paid the princely sum of one dollar a line for his verses. Before long he was ready to collect a treasury of Nash; he wanted to call it a “trashery of Nashery,” but his publishers found a more conventional title for this highly unconventional writer.

Nash married in 1931, after having published a first volume of poetry, and enjoyed a happy family life as the father of two loving daughters. After a second volume appeared, he left his job in publishing to devote his time to writing. Thereafter he commanded top dollar for his occasional poems, which appeared in such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Harper’s, Life, and The Saturday Evening Post. He also made frequent appearances on radio and television. As he and the century approached middle age, he realized that he spoke for a large number of Americans. His fame brought him contracts to edit anthologies and allowed him to help out struggling poets. However, he realized with some bitterness that he was a victim of his own success, always commissioned to write more “Nashery,” and would never become a “major” poet.

To the end, Nash remained a typical American: a proud grandparent; a world traveler by rail and ship, though never by air; and a reluctant user of medical services. He kept up with the new names in modern culture and wrote a poem on the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre for The New Yorker when he was nearing his own end (“One Man’s Opium,” 1970). He died from a massive stroke after surgery in 1971.

Analysis

Ogden Nash admired the acerbic couplets of Dorothy Parker, including her famous remark that “Men seldom make passes/ At girls who wear glasses.” His early contributions to The New Yorker were “Random Reflections” in verse, including the oft-quoted lines on “Ice-Breaking”: “Candy/ Is dandy/ But liquor/ Is quicker.” His sentences could be gnomic, like this one or its successor, “Pot/ Is not.” More often, they would tumble headlong in search of a rhyme, often violating standard syntax and spelling to get the rhyme. He claimed to have learned his technique from reading bad poetry; in particular he mentioned Julia A. Moore (1847-1920), known as the Sweet Singer of Michigan after the title poem of her most enduring book. Mark Twain claimed that Moore had “the touch that makes an intentionally humorous episode pathetic and an intentionally pathetic one funny.” Nash’s humor was intentional, unlike Moore’s; he claimed to have “intentionally maltreated and man-handled every known rule of grammar, spelling, and prosody,” but his rhythms and rhymes were just as bad.

“Spring Comes to Murray Hill”

Nash’s first published poem, in 1929, shows his technique fully formed. The poem consists of fourteen lines, in seven rhymed couplets, and each of the rhymes is a stretch. In the fourth line, Nash turns the noun “gargle” into “goggerel” to rhyme with “doggerel,” which seems an apt characterization of the writing. The speaker is Nash himself, an office worker on Madison Avenue whose mind wanders during a bout of spring fever. There is no real point to the wandering, which takes him from Missouri to Massachusetts and from his chiropodist to John the Baptist, who becomes the “Bobodist.” There is only the vague wish for freedom, symbolized by the “wings of a bird.” By the illogic of rhyme, the “bird” can take the speaker to Second Avenue and even to “Third.”

“More About People”

Nash began writing for publication when the United States was entering the Great Depression. Although he wrote for a magazine that targeted New York’s affluent social set, he became increasingly aware of the gap between the rich and the poor. A contribution from 1930, “More About People,” shows his awareness that “work is wonderful medicine” for anyone in danger of starvation. Seeking a rhyme for “medicine,” he runs through a list of employers, “Firestone and Ford and Edison,” using the well-known names to evoke successful people. Nevertheless, he sides with the employed rather than with the employers. The poem continues through eight couplets, ending with “a nasty quirk”: “if you don’t want to work you have to work to earn enough money so that you won’t have to work.”

“A Necessary Dirge”

Nash loved to play the curmudgeon and could rail about everything from billboards to parsnips, but he was always able to put life in perspective. “A Necessary Dirge” (1935) is a reflection on the perversity of “man’s fate” in ten rhyming couplets. For example, “How easy for those who do not bulge/ Not to indulge.” Nash combines the universal and the particular, the Lexington Avenue express subway train and the hero’s quest. He would like to raise the big question of theodicy: He would like to ask God why there is suffering in the world. Yet he accepts his fate, “to be irked,” and advises readers to take the “irking with insouciant urbanity.” Humorous poetry can also be wise, as this poem shows.

“Ask Daddy, He Won’t Know”

As his family grew, Nash’s poems extended to all aspects of domestic life. Looking forward to the rituals of homework in a 1942 poem, “Ask Daddy, He Won’t Know,” the speaker dreads the impending discovery that yesterday’s genius—the boy whose “scholarship was famous”—will become tomorrow’s “ignoramus,” unable to answer questions about geometry and geography. The speaker is proud of his children but admits that he is “overwhelmed by their erudite banter.” Of course, the poem is ironic; Nash commands all sorts of random information, even if it tends to stay “just back of the tip of my tongue.” The real ignoramuses, by implication, are the young who assume that he knows nothing, and not just Nash’s young. “Try to explain that to your young,” he says to the reader.

Versus

Nash’s first volume of poetry after World War II was full of paradoxes. Its very title suggests that the poet is adversarial in nature, going against the prosaic order of things. His verses on subjects from bridge to birthday cake are also statements “versus” unthinking acceptance of things as they are. He is well aware of his poetic tradition; he knows that William Wordsworth said, “The Child is father of the Man” (in “My Heart Leaps Up,” 1802); however, he knows enough about children that he would like to add, “But not for quite a while.” His poem on the subject, titled “Lines to Be Embroidered on a Bib,” employs the verse form known as the clerihew; it takes the names of famous writers and thinkers and makes rhymes with them with the sort of witty precision that W. H. Auden would master.

Nash jokes about the squabbles between a big dog and a little dog in a poem whose title, “Two Dogs Have I,” alludes to Sonnet 144 of William Shakespeare. The dust-jacket blurb notes that British readers had found the philosophical side of Nash that Americans often miss, and it quotes The Times of London on the “Democritean streak which entitles him to the respect due to a philosopher, albeit a laughing one.” Indeed, much as the ancient Greek philosopher Democritus opined on the full and the void, Nash turns the old adage “Nature abhors a vacuum” into a personal reflection on the housing crisis in “Nature Abhors a Vacancy.” No matter if one misses the occasional allusion: There are gags for all.

There’s Always Another Windmill

Amid the postwar optimism, Nash found much to grumble about but few publishers who wanted his grumblings. He turned to lighter subjects, like animals, and to familiar verse forms like the limerick. When he took on unpopular causes, he adopted a quixotic tone, hence the title of his late volume There’s Always Another Windmill (1968). Included here is “The Nonbiography of a Nobody,” a darkly confessional poem that finds only “one compensation for being a minor literary figure”: “There’s little there for the ghouls to feed on.” The volume has its bright moments, including a series of limericks written as a tribute to Edward Lear (1812-1888), the self-styled inventor of “nonsense verse” and the main popularizer of the limerick. It concludes with “The Sunset Years of Samuel Shy,” a Nash persona who claims to be a master, “But not of my fate.”

Bibliography

1 

Axford, L. B. An Index to the Poems of Ogden Nash. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972. Because Nash’s individual poems were often reprinted, this bibliography is a handy way to find the first publication of any Nash poem and gauge its popularity by the number of reprintings.

2 

Collins, Billy. “Billy Collins on Ogden Nash.” In Poetry Speaks, edited by Elise Paschen and Rebekah Presson Mosby. Napersville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2001. Simply placing Nash in this anthology and compact disk of poets reading their poetry—with the likes of Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot—is a statement of Nash’s poetic quality, and Collins’s assessment confirms the choice, though he faults Nash’s verse for always trying to be funny.

3 

Crandall, George W., ed. Ogden Nash: A Descriptive Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1990. Gives complete publishing details of Nash’s many books, through all their printings. Helpful for identifying occasional pieces not cited in Axford’s index.

4 

Kermode, Frank. “Maturing Late or Simply Rotting Early?” The Spectator, September 24, 1994, 36-37. A major British critic discusses Nash’s appeal to a new generation of readers. Kermode is able to catch the literary allusions in Nash’s collected poems and dignifies Nash with a careful reading.

5 

Nash, Ogden. Interview by Roy Newquist. In Conversations. New York: Dodd, 1959. An interview with Nash conducted at the peak of his career, looking back on his New Yorker days. Valuable for Nash’s comments on the craft of his verse.

6 

_______. Loving Letters from Ogden Nash: A Family Album. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. A selection of Nash’s personal letters, with commentary by his eldest daughter, Linnell Nash Smith.

7 

Parker, Douglas M. Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America’s Laureate of Light Verse. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005. A wide-ranging biography of the poet, illustrated and includes bibliography.

8 

Stuart, David. The Life and Rhymes of Ogden Nash. Lanham, Md.: Madison Books, 2000. A critical biography, illustrated with photos from the Nash papers at the University of Texas in Austin. Includes verses about Nash by contemporary reviewers imitating his style and previously unpublished verses by such friends as Dorothy Parker and E. B. White.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Willard, Thomas. "Ogden Nash." Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSPAM_12510160000699.
APA 7th
Willard, T. (2011). Ogden Nash. In R. M. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Willard, Thomas. "Ogden Nash." Edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.