Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash
Born	August 19 1902(1902-08-19) Rye, New York
Died	May 19 1971 (aged 68) Baltimore, Maryland
Occupation	Poet, author, lyric-writer

Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971) was an American poet best known for writing pithy and funny light verse. At the time of his death in 1971, the New York Times said his "droll verse with its unconventional rhymes made him the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry."

Light verse is poetry that attempts to be humorous. Poems considered "light" are usually brief, and can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature wordplay, including puns, adventurous rhyme and heavy alliteration. Typically, light verse in English is formal verse, although a few free verse poets, such as Billy Collins, have excelled at light verse outside the formal verse tradition.

While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel, or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned "serious" poets, such as Horace, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and W. H. Auden, have also excelled at light verse. Many profound truths are well expressed with a light touch.

Biography

Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York. His father owned and operated an import-export company, and because of business obligations, the family relocated often.

After graduating from St. George's School in Middletown, Rhode Island, Nash entered Harvard University in 1920, only to drop out a year later. He returned to St. George's to teach for a year and left to work his way through a series of other jobs, eventually landing a position as an editor at Doubleday publishing house, where he first began to write poetry.

Nash moved to Baltimore, Maryland, three years after marrying Frances Leonard, a Baltimore native. He lived in Baltimore from 1934 and for most of his life until his death in 1971. Nash thought of Baltimore as home. After his return from a brief move to New York, he wrote "I could have loved New York had I not loved Balti-more."

His first job in New York was as a writer of the streetcar card ads for a company that previously had employed another Baltimore resident, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nash loved to rhyme. "I think in terms of rhyme, and have since I was six years old," he stated in a 1958 news interview. He had a fondness for crafting his own words whenever rhyming words did not exist, though admitting that crafting rhymes was not always the easiest task.

In 1931 he published his first collection of poems, Hard Lines, earning him national recognition. Some of his poems reflected an anti-establishment feeling. For example, one verse, entitled Common Sense, asks:

Why did the Lord give us agility,

If not to evade responsibility?

When Nash wasn't writing poems, he made guest appearances on comedy and radio shows and toured the United States and England, giving lectures at colleges and universities.

Nash was regarded respectfully by the literary establishment, and his poems were frequently anthologized even in serious collections such as Selden Rodman's 1946 A New Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Nash was the lyricist for the Broadway musical One Touch of Venus, collaborating with librettist S. J. Perelman and composer Kurt Weill. The show included the notable song "Speak Low." He also wrote the lyrics for the 1952 revue Two's Company.

Nash and his love of the Baltimore Colts were featured in the December 13, 1968 issue of LIFE, with several poems about the American football team matched to full-page pictures. Entitled "My Colts, verses and reverses," the issue includes his poems and photographs by Arthur Rickerby. "Mr. Nash, the league leading writer of light verse (Averaging better than 6.3 lines per carry), lives in Baltimore and loves the Colts" it declares. The comments further describe Nash as "a fanatic of the Baltimore Colts, and a gentleman." Featured on the magazine cover is defensive player Dennis Gaubatz, number 53, in midair pursuit with this description: "That is he, looming 10 feet tall or taller above the Steelers' signal caller…. Since Gaubatz acts like this on Sunday, I'll do my quarterbacking Monday." Prominent Colts Jimmy Orr, Billy Ray Smith, Bubba Smith, Willie Richardson, Dick Szymanski and Lou Michaels contribute to the poetry.

Among his most popular writings were a series of animal verses, many of which featured his off-kilter rhyming devices. Examples include "If called by a panther / Don't anther"; "You can have my jellyfish / I'm not sellyfish"; and "The Lord in His wisdom made the fly / And then forgot to tell us why." This is his ode to the llama:

The one-L lama, he's a priest

The two-L llama, he's a beast

And I would bet a silk pyjama

There isn't any three-L lllama

(Nash appended a footnote to this poem: "The author's attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as a three-alarmer. Pooh.")

Nash died of Crohn's disease at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on May 19, 1971. He is interred in North Hampton, New Hampshire. His daughter Isabel was married to noted photographer Fred Eberstadt, and his granddaughter, Fernanda Eberstadt, is an acclaimed author.

A biography, Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse, was written by Douglas M. Parker, published in 2005 and in paperback in 2007. The book was written with the cooperation of the Nash family and quotes extensively from Nash's personal correspondence as well as his poetry.

Poetry style

Nash was best known for surprising, pun-like rhymes, sometimes with words deliberately misspelled for comic effect, as in his retort to Dorothy Parker's dictum, Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses:

A girl who is bespectacled

She may not get her nectacled

But safety pins and bassinets

Await the girl who fassinets.

He often wrote in an exaggerated verse form with pairs of lines that rhyme, but are of dissimilar length and irregular meter.

The critic Morris Bishop, when reviewing Nash's 1962 Everyone But Thee and Me, offered up this lyrical commentary on Nash's style:

Free from flashiness, free from trashiness

Is the essence of ogdenashiness.

Rich, original, rash and rational

Stands the monument ogdenational!

Nash's poetry was often a playful twist of an old saying or poem. He expressed this playfulness in what is perhaps his most famous rhyme. Nash observed the following in a turn of Joyce Kilmer's words "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree."

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,

I'll never see a tree at all.

Similarly, in Reflections on Ice-Breaking he wrote:

Candy

Is dandy

But liquor

Is quicker.

He also commented:

I often wonder which is mine:

Tolerance, or a rubber spine?

His one-line observations are often quoted.

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.

Other poems

Nash was a baseball fan, and he wrote a poem titled "Lineup for Yesterday," an alphabetical poem listing baseball immortals. Published in Sport magazine in January 1949, the poem pays tribute to the baseball greats and to his own fanaticism, in alphabetical order. Here is a sampling from his A to Z list:

C is for Cobb, Who grew spikes and not corn, And made all the basemen Wish they weren't born.

D is for Dean, The grammatical Diz, When they asked, Who's the tops? Said correctly, I is.

E is for Evers, His jaw in advance; Never afraid To Tinker with Chance.

F is for Fordham And Frankie and Frisch; I wish he were back With the Giants, I wish.

G is for Gehrig, The Pride of the Stadium; His record pure gold, His courage, pure radium.

H is for Hornsby; When pitching to Rog, The pitcher would pitch, Then the pitcher would dodge.

I is for Me, Not a hard-hitting man, But an outstanding all-time Incurable fan.'

Q is for Don Quixote Cornelius Mack; Neither Yankees nor years can halt his attack.

Nash wrote about the famous baseball players of his day, but he particularly loved Baltimore sports.

Nash wrote humorous poems for each movement of the Camille Saint-Saëns orchestral suite The Carnival of the Animals, which are often recited when the work is performed.

Legacy

Nash's style has proven inimitable. His whimsical use of language has few peers aside from Dr. Seuss. He has been honored by among others the United States Postal Service.

Ogden Nash stamp

The U.S. Postal Service released a stamp featuring Ogden Nash and six of his poems on the centennial of his birth on August 19, 2002. The six poems are "The Turtle," "The Cow," "Crossing The Border," "The Kitten," "The Camel" and "Limerick One." It was the first stamp in the history of the USPS to include the word "sex," although as a synonym for gender. It can be found under the "O" and is part of "The Turtle." The stamp is the 18th in the Literary Arts section. Four years later, the first issue took place in Baltimore on August 19. The ceremony was held at the home that he and his wife Frances shared with his parents on 4300 Rugby Road, where he did most of his writing.

Author Bibliography

• Bed Riddance by Ogden Nash. Little Brown & Co, 1969. OCLC 94219
• Candy is Dandy by Ogden Nash, Anthony Burgess, Linell Smith, and Isabel Eberstadt. Carlton Books Ltd, 1994. ISBN 0233988920
• Custard the Dragon and the Wicked Knight by Ogden Nash and Lynn Munsinger. Little, Brown Young Readers, 1999. ISBN 0316599050
• I'm a Stranger Here Myself by Ogden Nash. Buccaneer Books, 1994. ISBN 1568494688
• Many Long Years Ago by Ogden Nash. Little Brown & Co, 1945. OCLC 289833
• The Old Dog Barks Backwards by Ogden Nash. Little Brown & Co, 1972. ISBN 0316598046
• Ogden Nash's Zoo by Ogden Nash and Etienne Delessert. Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1986. ISBN 0941434958
• Pocket Book of Ogden Nash by Ogden Nash. Pocket, 1990. ISBN 0671727893
• Private Dining Room by Ogden Nash. Little Brown & Co, 1952. OCLC 5354860
• Selected Poetry of Ogden Nash by Ogden Nash. Black Dog & Levanthal Publishing, 1995. ISBN 1884822308
• The Tale of the Custard Dragon by Ogden Nash and Lynn Munsinger. Little, Brown Young Readers, 1998. ISBN 0316590312
• There's Always Another Windmill by Ogden Nash. Little Brown & Co, 1968. ISBN 0316598399

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Crandell, George W., Ogden Nash: a descriptive bibliography. Scarecrow Press, 1990. ISBN 9780810823327
• Fraser, C. Gerald, "New & Noteworthy," The New York Times, July 7, 1985. Viewed Sept. 6, 2007.

• Kennedy, Caroline, and Jon J. Muth. A Family of Poems: my favorite poetry for children. Hyperion Books for Children, 2005. ISBN 9780786851119
• Parker, Douglas M., Ogden Nash: the life and work of America's laureate of light verse. Ivan R. Dee, 2005 ISBN 9781566636377

External links

All links retrieved November 17, 2022.

• American Poems: Ogden Nash - Includes a list of over a hundred Ogden Nash poems. Most or all are under copyright and therefore not available online.
• A Tribute to the Poet selected poems, and a brief bibliography
• Ogden Nash Memorial at Find A Grave
• Blogden Nash - Cataloging the global reach and influence of Ogden Nash on contemporary life.

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