For the forty years of Ogden Nash's career as America's foremost white-collar humorist, the popular success of his books of light verse expressed the consensus view of the reading public anent poetry: they, too, dislike it. Dislike, that is, the oracular assumptions that most poets make, their claims to a higher wisdom, a more finely-turned awareness and larger emotions than are found to obtain elsewhere in the middle class. Nash had no such pretensions. He wrote his verses about just those subjects that a well-behaved dinner guest might use for conversational fodder in mixed company. He was the very beau idéal that Emily Post commended to her genteel readers in her perdurable Etiquette: “What he says is of no moment. It is the twist he gives to it, the intonation, the personality he puts into his quip. … Our greatly beloved Will Rogers could tell a group of people that it had rained today and would probably rain tomorrow, and make everyone burst into laughter …”.

But while Mrs Post approved humour, she feared, justly, the subversive power of wit: “The one in greatest danger of making enemies is the man or woman of brilliant wit. If sharp, wit tends to produce a feeling of mistrust even when it stimulates. … [P]erfectly well-intentioned people, who mean to say nothing unkind, in the flash of a second ‘see a point,’ and in the next second score it with no more power to resist than a drug addict has to refuse a dose put into his hand!” It was by his shrewd abstention from saying anything that might give offence, by his spirit's entire accord with the principles set forth in the Post decalogue (the first edition of Etiquette appeared in 1922, when Nash was twenty), that Nash secured for his verses an audience (and for himself an income) larger than that enjoyed by any American poet of his time.

In the first poem he placed with the New Yorker (where he would soon after be employed), Nash already defined himself as the spokesman and representative of the white-collar audience that felt a kindred complacent malaise about the terms of their employment and the dimensions of their lives:

I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue
And say to myself You have a responsible job,
                                                                                havenue?
Why then do you fritter away your time on this
                                                                                doggerel?
If you have a sore throat you can cure it by using a
                                                            good goggeral,
If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a
                                                                 chiropodist,
And you can get your original sin removed by St John
                                                                                the Bopodist,
Why then should this flocculent lassitude be incur-
                                                                                          able?
Kansas City, Kansas, proves that even Kansas City
                              needn't always be Missourible.
Up up my soul! This inaction is abominable.
Perhaps it is the result of disturbances abdomin-
                                                                                          able.
The pilgrims settled Massachusetts in 1620 when
                    they landed on a stone hummock.
Maybe if they were here now they would settle my
                                                                                stomach.
Oh, if I only had the wings of a bird
Instead of being confined on Madison Avenue I
                    could soar in a jiffy to Second or Third.

(“Spring Comes to Murray Hill”)

Already in these first magazine verses Nash displayed all the tricks and tropes that were to become his trademarks: orthographic deformation for the sake of a rhyme-forced hyper-pun; the use of the archaic vocabulary and syntax of inspirational schoolroom poetry, a venerable gambit, which Nash deploys to mock his own pretensions and aspirations; and (a device that Nash virtually copyrighted, though he did not invent it) the elastic couplet, or Nash Rambler (TM), that can grow to any length provided it's stopped by a rhyme. Anthony Burgess gives the Rambler its due in his very brief pastiche “Introduction”, in which he declares: “I am trying to imitate him here, but he is probably quite inimitable. / My own talent for this sort of thing being limited and his virtually illimitable”. For Burgess as toastmaster, Nash transcends all forms of criticism but polite applause: “In the face of the unanalysable I must not be analytical. / And when a writer is beyond criticism it is stupid to go all critical”. Or, as Thumper's mother advised Bambi: “If you can't say something nice about someone, you shouldn't say anything at all.”

Nash had another mode, not so patentedly his, but one no less essential to his position as laureate to Middle America—the mini-maxim. “In the Vanities / No one wears panities” and, apropos of Baby, “A bit of talcum / Is always walcum” are fair samples. The object of these Ad-Age adages is not so much to be witty and epigrammatic as to be remembered and produced at the appropriate cue, to become a supply of verbal small change for those whose sense of humour is limited to rote performance. In my childhood, in the 1940s in Minnesota, Nash's most famous mini-maxim, “Reflection on Ice-Breaking”, (“Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker”) was trotted out on all occasions of ceremonial imbibing, always with the same preliminary chuckle of obeisance to the god of mirth and catch-phrases.

Time has not been kind to these jingles, since it is difficult to be at once pithy and innocuous, but even Nash's most skilful drolleries suffer for being heaped together into a Selected Poems. Candy may be tasty one piece at a time, but this is a gross of Snickers. Very soon the sameness of the product will cloy for even the avidest consumer. If there must be a big book, why not go whole hog and give us Nash's Complete Poems? There is no rationale given for the poems excluded (of the 101 poems from Versus of 1949, forty-one are reprinted) and no attempt to produce a semblance of variety by including the lyrics Nash wrote for the musical One Touch of Venus or any sample of his books for children. Anything to take the curse of sameness off the enterprise would have been welcome.

Measured against the general level of accomplishment in any standard anthology of humorous verse, Nash's limitations are glaringly evident. Narrative is not in his line, nor comic monologue (one must observe to be able to mimic), nor (least of all) satire, nor yet parody. His frame of intellectual reference remained, until his death in 1971, that of a well-brought-up eleven-year-old, and his allusive power is limited accordingly. His attention to public events is nil. He has no bêtes noires, only pet peeves: uncomfortable beds, incompetent caddies, anything smelly or noisy or odd-tasting. He has but a single persona—Dagwood.

What is left, and what Nash was best at, is word-play, as in “The Lama”, where, after doubting whether a “three-lllama” anywhere exists, he caps his verses with a prose footnote: “The author's attention has been called to a type of conflagration known as the three-alarmer. Pooh.” Yet for every poem that's genuinely risible, I Wouldn't Have Missed It offers a dozen that range from perfunctory to bromidic.

Finally it was not Thalia, that sharp-tongued shrew, who was Nash's muse, but Emily Post, who advised, concerning “The Code of a Gentleman”: “Exhibitions of anger, fear, hatred, embarrassment, ardor, or hilarity are all bad form in public.” No one can say of Ogden Nash that he was not a gentleman.