[In this review, the critic lauds Nash's abilities as an ironist and philosopher, in addition to his talent as a humorist.]

Although it is impossible to appreciate all the subtleties and refinements of Mr. Ogden Nash's humour without some knowledge of the domestic habits of the Americans, or at least of the New Yorker's attitude to them, the welcome given on this side of the Atlantic to his two previous collections of nonsense rhymes and cautionary tales in verse would certainly seem to justify a separate English edition of his latest one [Versus]. Mr. Nash's English readers will be delighted by it, for once again he proves himself to be a most ingenious and amusing critic of human frailty and absurdity. It would be a mistake, however, to think of him merely as a funny man; like Mr. Thurber, he has a Democritean streak which entitles him to the respect due to a philosopher, albeit a laughing one. His philosophy is that of the ironist rather than that of the satirist. "Well," he says,

The vicissitudes and eccentricitudes of domestic life, as they affect a gentle, somewhat bewildered man of forty-five, are responsible for the vicissitudes and eccentricitudes of the form as well as the substance of his verses. Like a clown, he is most endearing when he is most deeply involved in them, for, as he remarks:

Humour depends on the point of view,
It's a question of what is happening to who.

And to illustrate this profound truth he reminds us that

If the puppy is ill on your new tuxedo,
Why, naturally, you don't laugh, but he do.

We may indeed laugh at him as the victim of circumstance—of the people upstairs

Who when their orgy at last abates
Go to the bathroom on roller-skates,

of the awful Miss Hopper, the "Polterguest," of uninflammable petrol-lighters, of child-pianists, of "bobby-soxers," of relatives' prescriptions, of the rainy house-party and "the girl who does Ruth Draper"; but we also laugh with him because, by describing these personal experiences with detachment, he gives them universal validity. Even when he invites us to join him as a spectator of other people's behaviour—the grown-up man trying to outwit a duck, the diners-out who "cry 'Garçon' after the school of Stratford-atte-Bowe or New Rochelle," the golfer or the commuter—his irony is always gentle: at the most it may tickle, but it is incapable of lacerating the heart.

At times even this teasing instrument is laid aside; in such cautionary tales as "The Outcome of Mr. Buck's Superstition" and "The Confessions of Count Mowgli de Sade" Mr. Nash is content merely to describe a situation and leave it to the judgment of his readers' sense of the ludicrous. His drollery is so immediately affecting that it is easy to underestimate and even to overlook what it owes to technical virtuosity. Humpty Dumpty would cer tainly have approved of Mr. Nash's command of language: but the liberties he takes with words and syntax and rhyme—liberties which only a highly literate clown would dare to take—may conceal from a casual reader the remarkable range and skill of his metric. It is not too much to say that there are very few poets who could not learn something from a study of his verse, especially his modulations of rhythm and his half-rhymes; and, in doing so, add profit to their pleasure.