[Below, American poet David McCord evaluates Nash's highly original voice and inventive genius, and compares Nash to other established American poets such as Robert Frost, E. B. White, e. e. cummings, and W. H. Auden.]

Perhaps you can't get there from here, but in Ogden Nash's company you will reach any number of pleasant destinations. You will also reach an inevitable conclusion, if you have not come to it years and lines ago: Nash is a genuine original voice, and such voices in any literature are rare. Consider the living American writers who combine in high degree wit with poetry or poetry with wit. Who are those with established reputations? Robert Frost, E. B. White, Ogden Nash, Thornton Wilder, James Thurber, E. E. Cummings, W. H. Auden, Morris Bishop. A very small company, and under these limitations not easily expanded. A few lines, fewer sentences, sometimes but a few words chosen blindfold from the mature work of any of these men are sufficient to establish the authorship. However much a poet or prose writer may perfect and enhance his skill, he will never achieve a truly original voice. He must be born with it.

Now one of the blessings of original voice, particularly in the poet, is that the assembled work in convenient book lengths reveals the total writer—that is the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. If Nash reads well in the magazines, he reads even better in his books as Frost does, as Auden does. The quality or density (of the poet) may vary, but not the voice, not the man. You are in his total company; an individual is talking. And if you happen to like him, you have companionship all the way. Ogden Nash is the most cheerful of all companions, and even when he falters now and then, or overreaches, one does not mind.

The latest Nash, of more than 100 pieces, is one of his best. Liking his quatrains, one reader regrets that this volume contains so few. Take "Birthday on the Beach":

At another yearI would not boggleExcept that when I jogI joggle.

It is true that a few of the scalpel studies of the Miss Rapunzel Fitts or Porteous Burnham sort appear controlled from the beginning by the concluding pun or dénouement. Keats wrote of "stretched meter"; Miss Rapunzel suffers from "tetched" meter. Yet in verse after verse Mr. Nash is still tilting with habits, quirks, crazes, obsessions, foibles and the like, at the grass roots of our society. He is still miraculously funny about things that drive us nuts.

He is human: "How did I get so old so quick?" Regretful: "The Audubon that I audubin. " Wishful: "And the best part of any guest / Is the last part out the door." Serious: "This great country, which wants all its children to go to college but is distrustful of its adults with college degrees. "

Certainly his inventive genius for the unpackaged rhyme was never better. Why, then, does he several times drop to the level of the little masters of the imprecise précis with football-footfall, hickory-history, manhood-canned goods amid a true-rhyme setting? But what of it, when there is plenty of privacy-Godivacy, definite-chef-in-it surprise!

And you shall be as precious, love,As a mermaidsk from Murmansk,And I will tend the customers, love,In a suit with two prupantsk.

There is one pr. revelations in this book. The more important of them is "A Tale of the Thirteenth Floor," a grim and marvelous ballad beyond Kipling, Service, Marquis—even beyond Nash. May the Gunga Din boys from here to Ultima Thule demagnetize their tape and take this on!

So I'll stash one cache of Ogden NashUnder my dead-spring bed.Where the sea lies calm round date and palmI shall drift with his verse I've read,To the Musial chime of the squeeze-play rhyme,For the Island of Done and Said.