Books: White-Collar Laureate

FAMILY REUNION (146 pp.) — Ogden Nash—Little, Brown ($2.50).

Ogden Nash, whose books have sold more than 1,000,000 copies, is probably the only writer of doggerel who has made a good thing, as well as a career, of giving calculated affront to poetry. The difference between Nash and his imitators is that somewhere in the cunningly dislocated gears of his lines he imprisons a patented point of view. It was observable in one of his earliest verses (sold to The New Yorker, in 1930), which began:

I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue And say to myself you have...

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