Nash the Man and Nash the Poet are well on their way to becoming Nash the Institution. A generation of readers has grown up that would find it hard to imagine a world without Nash, a world without his jagged lines, his inversions (no less famous than many religious conversions), his wry rhymes, and his polymorphic prosody. This being so, it is high time that his work was made the subject of Definitive Criticism. But criticism of what kind, what school? Ah, there's the rub!

The historical-comparative school might give him a working over as a jovial Juvenal. The psychoanalytic school could have a Roman holiday with his confessed likes and dislikes, his fears, joys, and obsessions, all of which, of course, may be traced to traumatic experiences that he tripped over before the age of three, or earlier. One Nash on the couch might well prove worth a gross of ordinary recumbent poets. The technical-metrical school could drive itself quite mad by trying to define his poetic devices, and distempers. And the New Critics, now not so new? How I should like to see what they would do to and with him, if he were turned over to them bound but not gagged! I can imagine some of the erudite, recondite, hermetic, crabbed, jargonized products of their "close readings." How useful it would be to have profound studies of Nash's poetic strategy, his texture, his ambiguities and ambivalences, his dichotomies! And if the New Critics were a bit rough with him, who could blame them? Has not he himself, in this new book, hit them where it hurts most—in the vocabulary?

Some words, like ugly courtiers,
Should lag behind the portieres.
Here's two such hippotomi:
Ambivalence, dichotomy.
I deprecate their prevalence,
Dichotomy, ambivalence.
Why do the learned quarterlies
Such couthless cant immortalize?

Were there but space enough and time, I might attempt criticism along one of the lines I have suggested. But I must content myself with being curt and reportorial. The essential fact is that there is as much first-rate Nash, and as little second-rate Nash, in this book as in any of his earlier volumes. Nothing is stale, nothing is withered; the laurels are still in the woods, flourishing and uncut. The old master shows no signs of weariness. His pitching arm is as strong as ever, his control as sure. But he has—yes, he has—mellowed. He hates less, likes more, and has extended his area of tolerance. He, who never suffered fools otherwise than madly, is now as often as not willing to let them go their ways with only a gentle chiding. He is practising coexistence with folly, foible, and fad, on a scale that he would have found impossible when he was merely a bachelor, and later only a husband and a father. But now he is a grandfather. Non sum qualis eram….

In a way it is a pity that this tolerance should invade his spirit at this particular moment in American history. When I reviewed his preceding book, The Private Dining Room, I spoke of him as a seeing-eye dog in the country of the blind. How well he served for years in that capacity! And now what an opportunity is offered him in a tranquilized America! He could, if he would, remain our one wholly anxious citizen; he could serve us as the antidote to Miltown and its similars. He could open eyes, glazed by happy pills, to the realities of our existence. And, indeed, it must be said, in all fairness, that during the rest of the time his verse does not suffer. A dozen poems prove that he is still a keen disliker; his dealings with Miss Nancy Mitford show that he can slit a silly neck as prettily as ever. The gift of eloquent brevity is still his.

This book demonstrates again what fit readers have long known: there is much more to Nash than the famous Nash tricks and trademarked practices. He is as skilful in regular verse forms as in his own, God-forbid-that-it-be-imitated, style. Read "Don't Be Cross Amanda," "Exit, Pursued by a Bear," "The Buses Headed for Scranton," and "A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor," if you would test his range.

Happy baby-sitting, Grandpa!