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’.
Nash’s poetics were interesting, strange and original. With his long lines skittering gleefully towards the rhyme words, much of his ‘good bad verse’, as he characterised it, resembles in cadence nothing so much as William McGonagall’s bad bad verse; but Nash was artful where McGonagall was inept. The rhythms are careful, and the feminine rhymes (when he’s good, which was far from always) surprise and delight, with their misspellings and proto-Unwinisms: ‘In spite of her sniffle/ Isabel’s chiffle’; ‘The turtle lives twixt plated decks/ That practically conceal its sex./ I think it clever of the turtle/In such a fix to be so fertile.’; ‘I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue/ And say to myself You have a responsible job, havenue?’; ‘insouciance’ rhymed with ‘nouciance’; ‘kedgeree’ with ‘tredgeree’.
Whimsical in print, Nash — whose father had suffered financial ruin in 1912 — wasn’t whimsical when it came to business.
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