Author Biography
Ogden Nash was born Frederic Ogden Nash in
Rye, New York, on August 19, 1902. He came
from a long line of distinguished Americans
stretching back to before the Revolutionary
War. In fact, the city of Nashville, Tennessee,
was named for one of his ancestors. His father,
Edmund Strudwick Nash, was in the import and
export business, and his mother, Mattie (Che-
nault) Nash, was a housekeeper.
The family was prosperous, and Nash lived
in various locations in his youth. He attended St.
George’s School in Newport, Rhode Island, and
then went on to Harvard University. After one
year at Harvard, though, his father’s business
soured, and financial concerns forced him to
drop out. He went back to his old school in
Newport as a teacher but could not handle the
stress of teaching, so he went on to a succession
of short-lived jobs: salesman, adviser, and then
editorial assistant. In 1925 he started in the mar-
keting department of Doubleday, Page Publishing
in New York, and there his talent with light verse
helped him move up to the position of advertising
copywriter. As his success in the advertising busi-
ness grew, his literary career also took off. The
year that he started at Doubleday also saw
the publication of his first children’s book,The
Cricket of Caradon. Not until five years later did
he break into the adult poetry market with the
publication of his poem ‘‘Spring Comes to Murray
Hill’’ in theNew Yorker, which led to the publica-
tion ofHard Lines, his first book of adult prose.
The book was a huge success, with seven printings
in its first year, a remarkable achievement in the
midstoftheGreatDepression.TheNew Yorker
continued to publish Nash’s poetry—he would
present 353 verses in its pages over the next
forty-one years—and after two years he left his
advertising job to join the magazine’s staff as an
editor, a position that he retained for only a little
more than a year.
In 1933 Nash married Frances Rider Leo-
nard, and they went on to have two daughters.
As his family grew, he focused more on writing
for children, producing such works asThe Bad
Parents’ Garden of Versein 1936 andGirls are
Sillyin 1962. ‘‘The Hippopotamus’’ was origi-
nally published in the 1938 collection I’m a
Stranger Here Myself. Nash also wrote briefly
for Hollywood films but only produced three
scripts before acknowledging that he was not
cut out for screenwriting. Throughout most of
his years, Nash lived the life of a celebrity and
was familiar to radio and television audiences as
a panelist on quiz shows. Nash died of heart
failure on May 19, 1971, in Baltimore, Mary-
land, and was buried in North Hampton, New
Hampshire.Poem Summary
Stanza 1
LINE 1
‘‘The Hippopotamus’’ begins with an excla-
matory statement, punctuated with an exclama-
tion point, which is somewhat rare in poetry.
The exclamation point does not necessarily
make the statement it expresses a command;
however, it serves to give readers the sense that
the poem’s speaker is surprised at the feelings
that he has discovered. There is nothing very
stunning about the poem’s simple title, so start-
ing it with the jolt of an exclamatory statement in
the first line is effective in arousing the reader’s
interest. Readers who come to this poem expect-
ing a heavy, massive, slow verbal style that
would match the physical impression of theOgden Nash(AP Images)
The Hippopotamus