If we are to measure poets by their distinctiveness—and for better or worse the achieving of distinctiveness is the raison d'être for most 20th-century American poetry—it simply won't do to think of Ogden Nash as a minor figure. He is as distinctive as Cummings, and will perhaps be around as long as Cummings. He was slightly younger but not much, and his death in 1971 left us with acres of Ogden Nashery as well as with a clear—maybe too clear—vision of how the art of light verse should be perpetrated. He created a body of work that went triumphantly against the prevailing esthetic of poetry as a lofty, Sextus-Propertius affair, and he stuck with his creation for nearly forever, thereby becoming the chief poetic practitioner of the grand mundane in our country's most successful literary magazine, The New Yorker. The New Yorker has published good and important works by most of America's most highly thought-of sobersides, but it would nonetheless have been a nothing venture without its comedians. Nash was, forever, its chief verse comedian. Nash was the one who kept reminding New Yorker readers—who might otherwise have been scared away by the flavor of compressed elegance characteristic of the "serious" poetry its editors favored—that verse could be relaxed and topical. In other words Nash was the one who practically singlehandedly kept the verse department of the magazine in the business that the rest of the magazine was in, of commenting with intelligence, wit and asperity upon the contemporary American scene—its fads and fashions, its promotional and rhetorical excesses, its varied social and cultural crises. His contributions were too often on the cute side, and one could argue that a greater satirical severity toward America's multitudinous morasses—in a magazine that has always had after all the most serious of literary and critical aspirations—would have been in order; but Nash could hardly have been expected to carry the whole burden here. What he did he did well, and in so doing he not only kept American verse more open and various in its aims and interests than it otherwise would have been, but also kept The New Yorker on a track from which its artier verse contributors constantly wished to remove it.

Nash's new volume is work from the last three or four years of his life. Some of it is not particularly good Nash; all of it wears thin, as does Cummings' work, if read in big hunks; but it is all sufficiently sharp and sufficiently attuned to contemporary occasions to suggest that Nash's feel for the here and now did not diminish in old age. Nor did his wit. There are even some surprising brief pieces in which he abandons his lifelong pose of Look-I-Can-Write-Worse-Verse-Than-You-Can, and easily qualifies as a good comic poet!