The very best of bad verse

In the mid-1930s, the poet Ogden Nash visited a rodeo, where the star attraction was a handsome cowboy parading with his wife and son. ‘This is Monty Montana,’ the announcer declared, ‘who is a great example to American young men and young women. He has never smoked a cigarette, he has never touched liquor.’ Nash’s voice rang out from the bleachers: ‘And that little boy is adopted.’

The chief thing about Ogden Nash was that he was funny. Though he wrote a handful of straightforward and affecting simple lyric poems, what he will be remembered for is his light verse. As well as, at its best, being very entertaining, it benefited from a really sure touch with prosody: what Nash himself called ‘this certain knack for rhyming and versification, which is something like the knack for sinking an eighteen-inch putt’.

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