Ogden Nash

Frederic Ogden Nash, born August 19, 1902, in Rye, New York, was an American poet who wrote more than 500 pieces of light verse. The New York Times called him the nation's best-known creator of humorous poetry, thanks to his offbeat rhyming schemes.

Nash, whose full name was Frederic Ogden Nash, was the son of Mattie Chenault and Edmund Strudwick Nash. He was baptized at Christ's Church. When he was two, his family lived in a house called "Ramaqua" on 50 acres near Port Chester, New York. His father ran a turpentine company. The family moved often for business. Nash was a descendant of Abner Nash, an early governor of North Carolina; the city of Nashville, Tennessee, was named after Abner's brother Francis, a Revolutionary War general.

Nash said in a 1958 interview that he had thought in rhyme since age six. He enjoyed inventing his own words when no existing rhyme worked, though he admitted this wasn't always easy. The family briefly lived in Savannah, Georgia, in a carriage house owned by Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA; he later wrote a poem about her house. After graduating from St. George's School in Rhode Island, he entered Harvard University in 1920 but left after a year. He taught at St. George's for one year, then returned to New York to sell bonds. He joked that in two years he sold just one bond—to his godmother—but saw many good movies. He then wrote streetcar card ads for Barron Collier, a company that had also employed F. Scott Fitzgerald. While working as an editor at Doubleday, he submitted short rhymes to *The New Yorker*. Editor Harold Ross asked for more, calling them the most original material they had seen lately. Nash spent three months in 1931 on the *New Yorker* editorial staff. That same year, he published his first poetry collection, *Hard Lines*, which earned national recognition. Some poems, like "Common Sense," showed an anti-establishment streak.

When not writing poems, Nash appeared on comedy and radio shows, toured the United States and the United Kingdom, and gave college lectures. The literary establishment respected him; his poems appeared in serious anthologies, including Selden Rodman's 1946 *A New Anthology of Modern Poetry*. He wrote lyrics for the 1943 Broadway musical *One Touch of Venus* with librettist S. J. Perelman and composer Kurt Weill, which included the song "Speak Low." He also wrote lyrics for the 1952 revue *Two's Company*.

Nash's love for the Baltimore Colts was featured in the December 13, 1968, issue of *Life* magazine, with poems about the football team matched to full-page photos by Arthur Rickerby. The issue, titled "My Colts, verses and reverses," described him as a fanatic and a gentleman, averaging better than 6.3 lines per carry. The cover showed defensive player Dennis Gaubatz; other players like Jimmy Orr, Billy Ray Smith, Bubba Smith, Willie Richardson, Dick Szymanski, and Lou Michaels appeared in the poetry.

Nash's most popular works included animal verses with off-kilter rhymes. Examples: "If called by a panther / Don't anther"; "Who wants my jellyfish? / I'm not sellyfish!"; and the famous llama poem: "The one-L lama, he's a priest. The two-L llama, he's a beast. And I will bet a silk pajama: there isn't any three-L lllama!" He later added a footnote about a three-alarmer fire, saying "Pooh." His best work appeared in 14 volumes between 1931 and 1972.

Nash's poetic style relied on surprising, pun-like rhymes, sometimes with deliberately misspelled words for comic effect. For example, in response to Dorothy Parker's line "Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses," he rhymed "spectacles" with "nectacled." Other rhymes worked by mispronunciation rather than misspelling. In "The Adventures of Isabel," he combined words to create a rhyme when Isabel confronts a witch. He often wrote in exaggerated verse form, with rhyming pairs of lines of dissimilar length and irregular meter. He also twisted old sayings or poems, such as adding to Joyce Kilmer's "Trees": "Indeed, unless the billboards fall / I'll never see a tree at all."

A baseball fan, Nash wrote "Line-Up for Yesterday," an alphabetical poem listing baseball immortals, published in *Sport* magazine in January 1949. It paid tribute to players and his own fandom. He also wrote humorous poems for various occasions. Nash died on May 19, 1971.