Many long years ago it was, indeed—fifteen, I be lieve—that Ogden Nash's first published writing appeared in The New Yorker. It was the immortal lyric entitled "Spring Comes to Murray Hill," which contained the couplet:

The Pilgrims setled Massachusetts in 1620 when they landed on a stone hummock,Maybe if they were here now they would settle my stomach.

The depression had produced a poet. Since then Ogden Nash has been, at one time or another, a magazine editor, Hollywood writer and musical-show librettist, but students yet unborn will find him listed in their History of English Literature as a poet.

Nash is the laureate of a generation which had to develop its own wry, none-too-joyful humor as the alternative to simply lying down on the floor and screaming. His ragged verse is remarkably like Ring Lardner's unpruned prose in effect—a catalogue of the annoying trifles that constitute our contemporary civilization, set down with a friendly leer. Lardner wrote about prohibition, golf, the stock market, Americans traveling abroad, million-dollar prizefights and similar nostalgic nuisances; Nash runs the gamut from the depression to Hitler, touching upon such disparate subjects as detective stories, crooners, the theatre-ticket shortage, Father's Day, knitting, colds, fruit salad, bankers, the circus, rain, strong drink, marriage and children's parties.

Many Long Years Ago is a sort of retrospective volume, representing Nash's published work to date. Any but the most well-read and retentive-minded Nash fan would find it difficult to separate the early verse from the recent. Both rejoice the innocent reader's heart with their leisurely tempo and indifference to formal scansion and their miraculous quasi-rhymes. Further, Nash is one of the rare people who can make a pun and make you like it. He can write sentimental rhymes about his children and make you like those, too. In short, he can do almost anything in the poet line, and he has been doing it for fifteen years.

A hair-spring sense of outrage is Nash's most valuable bit of professional equipment. He can be as angry at marshmallow or whipped cream on a salad as at an absconding banker, and as mad at the absconding banker as at Hitler. He is an urbane and articulate Donald Duck, an Alexander Pope with a hangover, a Rabelais whom you could introduce to your sister.