A well of poor English undefiled. A fountain of fizz, fun, and frolic. A Christmas tree under a colored light wheel. Plus gentle admonitions about the p's and q's of this world….

In undertaking to write about the poems of Ogden Nash, I think one may be excused, if not exonerated, for thus trying to seize in metaphor some breath of the poet's spirit. For in the world of humorous literature he is sui generis, almost without lineage; certainly we have little critical tradition to account for how he came to be. That is, if you take the world of literature to exclude the writers of bad verse, including "the sweet singer of Michigan," Julia Moore, whose verses inspired his artfully distorted syntax, gnarled rhythms, and mangled rhymes. Not since Lewis Carroll, I suppose, has any versifier gathered such a universal readership among both ordinary and discriminating readers. And probably no poet has had so many imitators.

I have been able to locate only a few of the poems of Julia Moore, but from them I can readily see that her flights were homely sentimental effusions notable for irregularities of rhythm, cliché expressions, awkward inversions, and inept rhymes. While Nash has sidestepped the homespun and the sentimental, he uses the same devices as Julia Moore, the good-humorous effect resulting principally from exaggeration. In his work, the irregularities are wild, the clichés are altered, the inversions are extreme; and the rhymes, elaborately contrived, often become outrageous word distortions. Bonus additions are redundancy and vernacular grammar. All these devices characteristically appear under a carefully assumed naïveté of expression and even manage at times to have an integral appropriateness.

O Duty,
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?
Why displayest thou the countenance of the kind of conscientious organizing spinster
That the minute you see her you are aginster?
Why glitter thy spectacles so ominously?
Why art thou clad so abominously?
Why art thou so different from Venus
And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually in common between us?…
("Kind of an Ode to Duty")

Merely to mention, however, the characteristic Nash techniques as outlined above is narrowly misleading; for he shows impressive resourcefulnes in avoiding stereotype. On some occasions he writes in conventional modes, which means dropping the playful and the lightly satirical to write the pure lyric or to add a didactic note to the prevailing humorous tenor of his verse.

Ogden Nash is thoroughly imbued with American life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. His verse tells us that he has an unflagging love of the American way of comfortable living. He sees from a reasonably high and cushy middle-class perch. We are not fooled when we observe in his poems a criticism of the people who enjoy a high standard of living. The genial cynicism is such that it shows both a self-awareness and an engagingly candid self-indulgence. He is an amiable bystander who would be unhappy if the passing parade yielded no foibles for him to toy with. Of course no reader is asking that he don sackcloth and ashes, and he is not about to do so …

The late Thomas Sugrue called Nash "the little man's laureate," not in the sense of championing underdog causes, but as dealing with universal themes at an easily accessible level. Anyone who has been in love, or yearned to be; who has lived with parents, or spouse, or children; who has had some smattering of parties, dinners, or almost any kind of social life; or who has been fascinated by language will catch the bright gleam of his own thoughts and experiences in Nash's verse.

What may at first seem a serious limitation in range is the absence of some aspects of American life. Aside from a few dozen short, conventional, humorous poems, describing such members of the animal kingdom as pig, rabbit, oyster, phoenix, grass-hopper, and smelt, there is little reflection of Nature—no rural life, no landscape, no world of mountains, rivers, forests. Nash stays near the drugstore, the theater, and the night club; that is, his world is that of the representative humorist in this mid-half of the twentieth century. That world is the life of the city, of structured society, ritual entertainment, and organized leisure. So that in terms of contemporary American life, which is predominantly urban, the exclusions seem now of little moment, except for the grimmer aspects represented by war, industrialism, and social injustice, subjects which are left to the Black Humorists for whatever drops of humor can be wrung out of the dark cloth of our time.

The country was made first,
Yes, but people lived in it and rehearsed,
And when they finally got civilization down,
Why, they moved to town.
("The City")

Food, taxis, cocktails, language, love, the common cold, the theater, travel, conscience, money, birthdays, card games, weather, football, matrimony—these topics and others, take his exuberant fancy. But the exuberance is seldom bubbly. More characteristically it is introspective, taking the form of a psychological process which is based on close observation of some subject that is commonly considered unimportant. Though it is marked by surface nonsense, it may be interpenetrated by a satiric common sense. Yet there is a range from poems expressing a serious, if covert, theme, to other poems that are arbitrarily, coyly playful—mere play—poems that make no attempt to reflect life or its texture, but accomplish only a momentary, sensuous tickle or tease, as in the expert limerick "Requiem" (don't ask why the title):

There was a young belle of old Natchez
Whose garments were always in patchez.
When comment arose
On the state of her clothes,
She drawled, When Ah itchez, Ah scratchez!

In a serious assessment of a poet with an overgenerous spirit of fun, the question of how much the content weighs in judging quality must be faced. No precise rule can be laid down; only a rough guide that goes something like this: the lighter the content, the greater the burden carried by the form. Language being an intellectual vehicle of meaning, we readily conclude that the poem must have some content, cannot be mere gibberish. It may, however, briefly forego discursive content if it can supply a psychological reflection of mood, which is itself a kind of content, even if it is expressed surrealistically. Moreover, a subject matter is not in itself necessarily heavy or light. Nuclear physics can be treated lightly, humorously; humor can be treated heavily, philosophically. What matters in determining lightness or heaviness is the poet's attitude and the details in which his attitude is embodied.

The practice of literary criticism yields supporting evidence for the relative importance of content. The "heavier" critics rarely undertake to deal with light verse poets. They may even demand a view of reality unmarked by humor. One remembers Matthew Arnold's refusal to give the highest rank to that great poet-humorist, Chaucer, because of a lack of "high seriousness." Of course, other critics do not give the same overwhelming importance to content; different schools of criticism place different values on the proper proportions of substance and form. But no literary critic will denominate as literature "The Ballad of Beautiful Words," a mere series of discrete words without predication and arranged in rhymed stanzas. For years this affront to literature was proudly printed periodically in a large metropolitan newspaper. As a "poem," it possessed only form in the shape of technique, or device, and was entirely without substance.

Of course there are no scales on which to weigh content. How account for—can we account for—the rather high place in literature of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland? Right off, assuming its highly skillful form, it won't do to maintain that it is the political and social allegory of Victorian England that satisfies the requirement of content; for such allegory has become a labored irrelevancy and is largely inaccessible to today's reader. What then? Not realism, for the story is a dream. But precisely so. Dreams are a part of life, a significant part whether or not we can determine accurately their meanings. The haunting lunacy of Alice's dream is disquietingly and amusedly seen as reflective of our own psychological processes, a lunacy and inconsecutiveness by no means confined to dreams.

The relevance of this reasoning to the poems of Ogden Nash should be clear. Its application is not always complimentary; certainly it is not always derogatory.

First of all, he is a very prolific poet. He has kept the presses warm with volume after volume. Every so often he publishes a selected volume which omits many previously published poems. Despite the selectivity, he could well afford to be much more selective. Many of the poems, even of those that survive the winnowing, evidence hasty composition and lax standards. One can only conclude that Nash sometimes scamps the arduous polishing needed to create a fully satisfying poetic experience. Not infrequently the reader perceives, not that the basic technique should have been different, but that Nash has not used well his own technique. The confident reader (brash, if you prefer) may feel that he knows how Nash should have said it to achieve a surer result.

This is particularly true of occasional rhymes which, instead of being expertly awkward, are awkwardly awkward. There exists a strong imperative for exact rhymes in light verse, and the lighter the verse the stronger the imperative. Not that Nash's rhymes must be conventionally exact. They should be unconventionally exact; and he should not allow the Eastern provincialism of pronouncing Canada to rhyme with janitor, a kind of offense of which he is guilty more than a few times. Where his poems betray such weaknesses of form, the literary needle registering the charge scarcely quivers.

If it were always so, this essay would not have been written. For Nash at his best is good indeed. He has adroitly blended the rhythms of prose and the varying line lengths of free verse with end-rhyming that is customarily alien to free verse. When not metrical, each couplet, often each line, moves like a prose sentence to a strong pause or full stop at the end. The often grotesque rhymes, the prose rhythms, and the widely varying line lengths blend to form a caricature of conventional versification.

Some indefatigable counter has declared that the number of syllables per line in Nash varies from two to sixty-two. The vast majority of his rhymes occur in couplets. Of course many poems follow regular metrics and regular stanza forms in almost every variety, more than a few of them parodying the tone and cadence of established works of literature. Something of this is suggested through titles, such as "Tarkington, Thou Should'st Be Living in This Hour," "Correction: Eve Delved and Adam Span," and "All, All Are Gone, the Old Familiar Quotations," as well as in clichés, whether oral or written, as in "A Dog's Best Friend Is His Illiteracy" and "You Bet Travel Is Broadening."

Amidst the elaborately artificial naïveté so much employed by Nash, his use of clichés cannot escape attention. Probably no other writer of literary stature has employed so many. If the unsophisticated reader is uneasy about this because he has been taught to avoid clichés, let him become enlightened as to their use in humor. They have been tellingly used by James Thurber, Robert Benchley, and probably every modern humorist you can name, including Frank Sullivan, whose fictional character, Doctor Arbuthnot, is a cliché expert, a collector of clichés. Nash himself (in a letter to me dated September 25, 1958) has put his finger precisely on the explanation for the effective use of clichés. "The trick is," he wrote, "that it must be somebody else's cliché and not the author's own." What that means is that the author keeps the cliché he uses from being considered naturally his own by a satirical, sophisticated context, or by an artful alteration in its phrasing. In one delightful poem of twenty-four lines, "The Visit," he manages seventeen clichés, a few of which are found in these lines:

She welcomes him with pretty impatience
And a cry of Greetings and salutations! …
Snug as a bug, the cup he waits
That cheers but not inebriates….
And now he whispers, a bit pajamaly,
That he's fed to the teeth with his whole fam damily,
Perhaps she'll forgive an old man's crotchet
And visit Bermuda on his yachat.

There is a considerable amount of mild didacticism in Nash's verse. Some part of it rises to the level of social criticism. A gift for epigrammatic summation is suggested by these lines:

It is easier for one parent to support seven children than for seven children to support one parent.

Women would rather be right than reasonable.

Never befriend the oppressed unless you are prepared to take on the oppressor.

Frankness consists in having your back bitten right to your face.

In such poems as reveal an unfaltering finesse there is usually a sufficient insight into individual thought or behavior patterns, or into social mores, to satisfy the reader who asks for a worthy, memorable, and enduring experience. The fact that Nash is one of the most quotable of poets supports the judgment that he is frequently master of harmoniously effective combinations of language and meaning.

Not surprisingly, the meaning is often only adequate and the pleasure lies in the language. Tortured rhymes of great ingenuity abound (Buddha, shouldha; savoir-faire, back of a chair; house the pup in, to dress up in; waiter, potater). So, too, examples of tortured grammar and word order (let one suffice): "The driest point in America is not Death Valley, but a man with lots of important work on his desk's throat." Puns are scarce, but other forms of word-play are frequent if not constant. ("Today I am a swashbuckler, would anybody like to buckle any swashes?" "Ye clergymen, draw near and clerge;…." "Who wants my jellyfish / I'm not sellyfish!") Because his own practice has the special purpose of humor, it is not inconsistent of him to satirize the popular substitution of like for as: "Like the hart panteth for the water brooks, I pant for the revival of Shakespeare's Like You Like It." Nonsense neologisms are found in "Your Lead, Partner, I Hope We've Read the Same Book," in which he tells of inventing Amaturo, a card game:

The deck has seven morkels
Of eleven guzzards each,
The game runs counterclockwise,
With an extra kleg for dreech,
And if you're caught with a gruice,
The score reverts to deuce.

Nonsense coinages nevertheless are rare in Nash. So, too, is fantasy:

Almost all of Nash's devices reveal some form of deliberate naïveté and therefore the reader appeal is, at least in good part, a flattering feeling of superiority. Such a device is circularity.

My attention has recently focussed
Upon the seventeen-year locust.
This is the year
When the seventeen-year locusts are here,
Which is the chief reason my attention has been focussed
Upon the seventeen-year locust.

How much of "the real Ogden Nash" is revealed in his poems? In the use of point of view, he tends to identify with the "I" or the poet speaking in the poem. He is capable, however, of writing on both sides of a quarrel in different poems, as in those dealing with the battle of the sexes. For example, contrary to custom, he takes the point of view of the woman in "The Trouble with Women Is Men." And in "If Fun Is Fun, Isn't That Enough?" he argues that no humorist is totally trustworthy.

They'll sell their birthright every time
To make a point or turn a rhyme.

This motto, child, is my bequest:
There's many a false word spoken in jest.

One feels sure, however, that when Nash is not writing as a humorist, he is writing out of honest attitudes and convictions. The occasional "straight" poem from his pen can be an unadulterated joy. "Listen" (beginning "There is a knocking in the skull") is a metaphysical poem worthy of Emily Dickinson. "A Lady Thinks She Is Thirty" is a pure lyric holding strains of seventeenth-century love poetry. The tightly held compassion in the six-line "Old Men" bursts forth in the closing couplet:

People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.

In "A Carol for Children" we catch a glimpse of an underlying religious reverence. It is a rare and sober note in Nash that reveals a sense of nostalgia for a time when faith was strong:

Two ultimate laws alone we know,
The ledger and the sword—
So far away, so long ago,
We lost the infant Lord.

From even a mere dozen of Nash's poems chosen at random, a reader could hardly fail to observe that, while Nash sees and enjoys the misfortunes, the ineptitudes, and the chicanery of men, he is not greatly exercised by the debit side of existence. In short, he is an optimist. Not a cheap one, but a cheerful one. While he is no professional celebrant of our country right or wrong, the detached and optimistic observer shows clear in the following lines from "Look What You Did, Christopher!":

The American people,
With grins jocose,
Always survive the fatal dose.
And though our systems are slightly wobbly,
We'll fool the doctor this time, probly.

Reviewing Nash's first volume of verse in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1931, William Rose Benét declared that it was "about as good a picture of his life and times as others have spent volumes on." Now, umpteen volumes later, the picture has taken on additional richness and detail and continues to delight as well as to provide some confections for reflection. The well-read will be rewarded by many allusions to song and character and story worked deftly into the fabric of the poetic experience. Varying elements of didacticism, never heavy, often merely playful, tease the ruminative mind. In his meanings, he seldom has depth, though there is more than the casual reader might think—more than a little of it social criticism. In his form and technique he has made a contribution to humorous literature—not momentous, perhaps, only ineradicable. Too much of him read at a sitting can indeed cloy. But read a little at a time, he provides unique and continuing delectation.

Grace. Gaiety. Charm. The artfully, quaintly naïve. Bounce. The puckish. The fantastic. The frivolous. These furnish some of the pleasures we get from what one of his inspired book blurbs called "The Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery."