Source:George W. Crandell, ‘‘Moral Incongruity and
Humor: The ‘Good Bad’ Poetry of Ogden Nash,’’ in
Studies in American Humor, Vol. 7, 1989, pp. 94–103.
Tom Disch
In the following review of Nash’sSelected Poems,
Disch outlines Nash’s limitations as a poet, stat-
ing that his poetic enterprise bears ‘‘the curse of
sameness.’’
For the forty years of Ogden Nash’s career
as America’s foremost white-collar humorist,
the popular success of his books of light verse
expressed the consensus view of the reading pub-
lic anent poetry: they, too, dislike it. Dislike, that
is, the oracular assumptions that most poets
make, their claims to a higher wisdom, a more
finely-turned awareness and larger emotions
than are found to obtain elsewhere in the middle
class. Nash had no such pretensions. He wrote
his verses about just those subjects that a well-
behaved dinner guest might use for conversa-
tional fodder in mixed company. He was the
very beau ide ́al that Emily Post commended to
her genteel readers in her perdurableEtiquette:
‘‘What he says is of no moment. It is the twist he
gives to it, the intonation, the personality he puts
into his quip.... Our greatly beloved Will Rog-
ers could tell a group of people that it had rained
today and would probably rain tomorrow, and
make everyone burst into laughter... ’’.
But while Mrs Post approved humour, she
feared, justly, the subversive power of wit: ‘‘The
one in greatest danger of making enemies is the
man or woman of brilliant wit. If sharp, wit tends
to produce a feeling of mistrust even when it
stimulates....[P]erfectlywell-intentionedpeople,
who mean to say nothing unkind, in the flash of a
second ‘see a point,’ and in the next second score
it with no more power to resist than a drug addict
has to refuse a dose put into his hand!’’ It was
by his shrewd abstention from saying anything
that might give offence, by his spirit’s entire
accord with the principles set forth in the Post
decalogue (the first edition ofEtiquetteappeared
in 1922, when Nash was twenty), that Nash
secured for his verses an audience (and for him-
self an income) larger than that enjoyed by any
American poet of his time.
In the first poem he placed with theNew
Yorker(where he would soon after be employed),
Nash already defined himself as the spokesman
and representative of the white-collar audience
that felt a kindred complacent malaise about the
terms of their employment and the dimensions of
their lives:
I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue
And say to myself You have a responsible job,
havenue?
Why then do you fritter away your time on this
doggerel?
If you have a sore throat you can cure it by
using a
good goggeral,
If you have a sore foot you can get it fixed by a
chiropodist,
Andyoucangetyouroriginalsinremovedby
St John
the Bopodist,
Why then should this flocculent lassitude be
incur—
able?
Kansas City, Kansas, proves that even Kan-
sas City
needn’t always be Missourible.
Up up my soul! This inaction is abominable.
Perhaps it is the result of disturbances
abdomin—
able.
The pilgrims settled Massachusetts in 1620
when
they landed on a stone hummock.
Maybe if they were here now they would
settle my
stomach.
Oh, if I only had the wings of a bird
Instead of being confined on Madison Ave-
nue I
could soar in a jiffy to Second or Third.
(‘‘Spring Comes to Murray Hill’’)
Already in these first magazine verses Nash
displayed all the tricks and tropes that were to
become his trademarks: orthographic deforma-
tion for the sake of a rhyme-forced hyper-pun;
the use of the archaic vocabulary and syntax of
inspirational schoolroom poetry, a venerable
gambit, which Nash deploys to mock his own
pretensions and aspirations; and (a device that
Nash virtually copyrighted, though he did not
invent it) the elastic couplet, or Nash Rambler
(TM), that can grow to any length provided it’s
stopped by a rhyme. Anthony Burgess gives the
Rambler its due in his very brief pastiche ‘‘Intro-
duction’’, in which he declares: ‘‘I am trying to
imitate him here, but he is probably quite inim-
itable. / My own talent for this sort of thing being
limited and his virtually illimitable’’. For BurgessThe Hippopotamus