Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash
Born	August 19 1902(1902-08-19) Rye, New York
Died	May 19 1971 (aged 68)
Occupation	Poet, author, lyric-writer

Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971) was an American poet best known for writing pithy and funny light verse.

Biography

Ogden Nash was born in Rye, New York. His father owned and operated an import-export company, and because of business obligations, the family relocated often.

After graduating from St. George's School (Middletown, Rhode Island), Nash entered Harvard University in 1920, only to drop out a year later. He returned to St. George's to teach for a year and left to work his way through a series of other jobs, eventually landing a position as an editor at Doubleday publishing house, where he first began to write poetry.

Nash moved to Baltimore three years after marrying Frances Leonard, a Baltimore girl. He lived in Baltimore from 1934 and most of his life until his death in 1971. Nash thought of Baltimore as home. After his return from a brief move to New York, he wrote "I could not love New York. Had I not loved Balti-more.")

His first job in New York was as a writer for the streetcar card ads for a company that previously had employed another Baltimore resident, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nash loved to rhyme. "I think in terms of rhyme...and have since I was six years old," he professed. He had a fondness for crafting his own words whenever rhyming words did not exist.

In 1931 he published his first collection of poems, Hard Lines, earning him national recognition. Some of his poems reflected an anti-establishment feeling. For example, one verse, entitled Common Sense, asks:

Why did the Lord give us agility,

If not to evade responsibility?

When Nash wasn’t writing poems, he made guest appearances on comedy and radio shows and toured the United States and England, giving lectures at colleges and universities.

Nash was regarded respectfully by the literary establishment, and his poems were frequently anthologized even in serious collections such as Selden Rodman's 1946 A New Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Nash was the lyricist for the Broadway musical One Touch of Venus, collaborating with librettist S. J. Perelman and composer Kurt Weill. The show included the notable song "Speak Low (When You Speak Love)." He also wrote the lyrics for the 1952 revue Two's Company.

Nash and his love of the Baltimore Colts were featured in the December 13, 1968 issue of Life Magazine, with several poems about the American football team matched to full-page pictures.

Nash died on May 19, 1971, in Baltimore, Maryland of Crohn's disease but is interred in North Hampton, New Hampshire. His daughter, Isabel, was married to noted photographer Fred Eberstadt, and his granddaughter, Fernanda Eberstadt, is an acclaimed author.

File:BedRiddance.PNG

Bed Riddance, 1970 collection

A biography was written by Douglas M. Parker, published in 2005 and in paperback in 2007. The book, Ogden Nash: The Life and Work of America's Laureate of Light Verse, was written with the cooperation of the Nash family and quotes extensively from Nash's personal correspondence as well as his poetry.

Poetry style

Nash was best known for surprising, pun-like rhymes, sometimes with words deliberately misspelled for comic effect, as in his retort to Dorothy Parker's dictum, Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses:

A girl who is bespectacled

She may not get her nectacled

But safety pins and bassinets

Await the girl who fassinets.

He often wrote in an exaggerated verse form with pairs of lines that rhyme, but are of dissimilar length and irregular meter. Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man uses this device to good effect.

The critic Morris Bishop, when reviewing Nash's 1962 Everyone But Thee and Me, offered up this lyrical commenatary on Nash's style:

Free from flashiness, free from trashiness

Is the essence of ogdenashiness.

Rich, original, rash and rational

Stands the monument ogdenational!

Nash's poetry was often a playful twist of an old saying or poem. He expressed this playfulness in what is perhaps his most famous rhyme. Nash observed the following in a turn of Joyce Kilmer's words " I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree."

I think that I shall never see

a billboard lovely as a tree.

Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,

I'll never see a tree at all.

Similarly, in Reflections on Ice-Breaking he wrote:

Candy

Is dandy

But liquor

Is quicker.

His one-line observations are often quoted.

People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up.

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.

Other Poems

Nash was a baseball fan, and he wrote a poem titled "Lineup for Yesterday," an alphabetical poem listing baseball immortals. He particularly loved Baltimore and Baltimore sports. Described by his daughter Linell as a "wild sports fan," he shared the rules of baseball and taught her to pitch when she was seven. He adored the Colts.

Nash wrote humorous poems for each movement of the Camille Saint-Saëns orchestral suite The Carnival of the Animals, which are often recited when the work is performed.

Ogden Nash Stamp

File:2002 USPS ogden nash.jpg

2002 USPS stamp of Ogden Nash with six of his poems in the background

The US Postal Service released a stamp featuring Ogden Nash and six of his poems on the centennial of his birth on 19 August, 2002. The six poems are "The Turtle," "The Cow," "Crossing The Border," "The Kitten," "The Camel" and "Limerick One." It includes the first stamp in the history of the USPS to include the word "sex," although as a synonym for gender. It can be found under the "O" and is part of "The Turtle". The stamp is the 18th in the Literary Arts series.

First day of issue took place in Baltimore on August 19th. The ceremony was held at the home that he and his wife Frances shared with his parents on 4300 Rugby Road, where he did most of his writing. The celebrities in attendance included Tom Matte, the Baltimore Colts quarterback hero. Matte read the poem Nash wrote about him and recounted how Mr. Nash had written poems about each of the Colts football team players. Post offices across the country offered the stamp on the following day.

External links

• American Poems: Ogden Nash - Includes a list of over a hundred Ogden Nash poems. Most or all are under copyright and therefore not available online.
• A Tribute to the Poet selected poems, and a brief bibliography
• Smoot smites smut Online text of Nash's poem relating how "Senator Smoot, Republican (Ut.)/is planning a ban on smut."
• Reelyredd's Poetry PagesCustard the Dragon
• Perspectives on Gossip The theme of gossip in three literary pieces, including a voice reading (mp3) of "I Have It On Good Authority" by Ogden Nash

Credits

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