I try to imitate him here, but he is probably
          quite inimitable.
My own talent for this sort of thing being
          limited and his virtually illimitable.

So Anthony Burgess in his Nashian introduction to this rather large selection, first published in 1983 and now out in paperback. Burgess does pretty well, but is right to feel that he doesn't sound very like the real thing. As he points out, Nash, being American, wrote a slightly different language. He will consider ‘despotic’ and ‘Arctic’, a good rhyme, also ‘want’ and ‘haunt’ (though well-spoken Englishmen of a century back might not have questioned this one). Moreover, he goes in for rhymes that frequently entail the joky modification of a rhyme word, so that ‘Hypochondriacs’ calls for ‘Adirondiacs’, and ‘cognac’ for ‘dipsomognac’. Burgess's exercise sticks close to full true rhyming, and his mimicry is best when he is imitating those long rambling lines which, after 50 or more words, finally discover their destination in a sometimes surprising but, by hindsight inevitable, rhyme word. In Burgess's pastiche the rhyme will be honest, while in Nash it will quite often be bent.

Nash went on doing this kind of thing from 1931 (Hard Lines) to 1972 (The Old Dog Barks Backwards), producing in all some 14 volumes of verses, with very little change of manner. Some of the Bellocian short pieces go well enough. The wombat

May exist on nuts and berries
Or then again, on missionaries;
His distant habitat precludes
Conclusive knowledge of his moods—

but you can't help noticing that ‘moods’ is not the mot juste—while ‘The Python’, 300 pages later, is in much the same vein, and still not quite a direct hit.

Most would agree that Nash's strength lay in those wantonly rambling couplets, often with a gross disparity between the length of lines that are always, in the end, married by predestined if comically distorted rhymes. But the repetition of this structural jest over 40 years makes, in a large selection (and perhaps especially in readers who loved the joke 40 years back), for a certain mild tedium.

You all know the story of the insomniac who
          got into such a state
Because the man upstairs dropped one shoe
          on the floor at eleven o'clock and the
          unhappy insomniac sat up till breakfast
          time waiting for him to drop the mate.
Well …

So begins a rather early poem.

Since the non-book and the anti-hero are
          now accepted elements of modern
          negative living
I feel justified in mentioning a few examples
          of the march of progress for which I
          suggest a heartfelt non-thanksgiving.

So begins a late one. It may be superficially up to date but deep down it's a bit old hat; this may seem unfair, since the skills are the same and highly individual, but it was the success of the earlier work that made them too familiar. Perhaps we are so conditioned by the idea that poets change and develop over a lifetime that it seems strange to have a collection of this sort which you can open anywhere and be sure to find just the same sort of things going on.

Nash was self-consciously American in other ways than rhyming, writing about baseball and basketball (which he commendably despised), about the problems of living in New York, or dieting, or the way women always keep you waiting when you are going out; or taxes, middle age, and the general awfulness of children. These are all genuine matters of poetic concern, but the tone is often slightly defeated, wanly jocular, and sometimes even a reader who feels himself entitled to be described as genial and sympathetic may from time to time feel bloodymindedly inclined to niggle, and even withhold the expected tribute of a giggle.

Now and then Nash allows himself a small explosion of dislike for the British; no harm in that, especially in work that belongs to the isolationist, pre-war, pre-jet, pre-special-relationship age. However, I remember him performing at a South Bank Poetry Festival around 1971 and reading his poems in a rather British way, quietly, and with much success. In fact he went close to stealing the show from such stars as Ashbery, Auden, Bly, and so on down the alphabet. He seemed very pleased at the time, and perhaps wrote no more nasty things about us thereafter, just going on about how, in his holiday haunt, the birds kept him awake, or how confusing directions to other people's holiday haunts can be, with suitably facetious allusions to the major English poets.

If memory isn't deceiving me he read at his London appearance a funny poem called ‘Very Like a Whale’ about simile and metaphor, ridiculing Byron at considerable length for claiming that the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold. The poem, included in this volume, was published in a collection of 1935, and of course I don't say there's no point in reading on after that, but nothing more elaborately funny may be expected. Incidentally, the editors, who are his daughters, tell us that Nash constantly revised his poems, so he can't just have been churning them out to meet deadlines. Possibly, like Yeats, he tried in revision to make his early poems sound like his late ones. That could be one reason why they tend to sound rather similar.

Additional coverage of Nash's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 13, 14; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 29-32R, 34, 61; Contemporary Authors Permanent Series, Vol. 1; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 23; DISCovering Authors Modules: Poets; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 11; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults; Major 20th-Century Writers; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 21; and Something About the Author, Vols. 2, 46.