He was easily the best-known—and possibly the best—American practitioner of a subtle art that is always more serious than it seems: the writing of light verse. As he observed in one of his last poems: "In chaos sublunary/What remains constant but buffoonery?"
He had few peers when it came to observing human foibles with a kind of wry delight, and he was undoubted master of the unique form that he devised: the line that runs on and on, metric foot after metric foot, only to snap to an end with an outrageously contrived rhyme that usually manages to contain a real groaner of a pun. When Ogden Nash died of heart failure last week at 68 in Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Hospital, he left an affectionate and inventive verbal legacy. Said his friend and editor Ned Bradford of Little, Brown: "He reflected all the joys and vexations of American life in those resigned but cheerful verses."
Some of his lines have become a part of American folklore.
If called by a panther, Don't anther.
In the Vanities,
No one wears panities.
Candy Is dandy But liquor Is quicker.
—to which he recently appended a contemporary afterthought:
Pot Is not.
A brace of his characteristic couplets:
I sit in an office at 244 Madison Avenue
And say to myself you have a responsible job, havenue?
And, inimitably, from "I Do, I Will, I Have":
So I hope husbands and wives will continue to debate and combat over everything debatable and combatable,
Because I believe a little incompatibility is the spice of life, particularly if he has income and she is pattable.
In lines anticipating environmental concerns, Nash delivered his classic put-down of Joyce Kilmer's gushy "Trees":
I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall, I'll never see a tree at all.
The quintessential Nash appears in "One Man's Opiate," published late last year in The New Yorker. In it, he brings off an excruciating knock-knock joke in French-en route to his conclusion about the uses of laughter in the gloomy present: "In this age penumbral,/Let the timbrel resound in the tumbrel."
"I have no private life and no personality," Nash once joked. In fact, he was a quiet and often private man, even though he spent much of his career on the lecture circuit. He would recite his marvelously serpentine and breathlessly amuck alexandrines like a tenor testing the limit of his lungs, terminating at last in a long-awaited gong of rhyme. His versifications made the bespectacled and gamesomely civilized poet something of a celebrity. His accent ("clam chowder of the East Coast—New England with a little Savannah at odd moments") was sometimes heard on radio's "Information, Please!" and the Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee hours.
Nash summered on the coast of New Hampshire and, when not traveling, settled for winter into his Baltimore town house. Some of his verse reflected a playful tenderness toward his wife:
Lots of people have lots more grace and cut fine figures at dances, while I was born with galoshes on—But nobody else has Frances.
For one of his two daughters, he once wrote: