Ogden Nash - Salem Press

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N Ogden Nash Nash, Ogden Born: Rye, New York; August 19, 1902 Died: Baltimore, Maryland; May 19, 1971 Principal poetry Hard Lines, 1931 Free Wheeling, 1931 Happy Days, 1933 The Primrose Path, 1935 The Bad Parents’ Garden of Verse, 1936 I’m a Stranger Here Myself, 1938 The Face Is Familiar, 1940 Good Intentions, 1942 Many Long Years Ago, 1945 Versus, 1949 Family Reunion, 1950 The Private Dining Room, 1953 You Can’t Get There from Here, 1957 Everyone but Thee and Me, 1962 Marriage Lines: Notes of a Student Husband, 1964 The Animal Garden, 1965 Santa Go Home: A Case History for Parents, 1967 The Cruise of the Aardvark, 1967 There’s Always Another Windmill, 1968 Bed Riddance: A Posy for the Indisposed, 1970 The Old Dog Barks Backwards, 1972 I Wouldn’t Have Missed It: Selected Poems, 1972 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 Nash, Ogden 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. 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 laureate 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. 2735
Nash, Ogden Critical Survey of Poetry 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, a verse 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- 2736 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 manhandled 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 Ogden Nash (Hulton Archive)
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Ogden Nash - Salem Press

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