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Frederic Ogden Nash (August 19, 1902 – May 19,
1971) was an American poet best known for writing
pithy, funny, light verse.

Nash was born in Rye, New York. His father owned
and operated an import-export company, and because
of business obligations Nash\'s family relocated
often.

In 1920 Nash entered Harvard University, only to
drop out a year later. He worked his way through a
series of jobs, eventually landing a position as a
copywriter at a Doubleday publishing house, where
he first began to write poetry.

In 1931 he published his first collection of
poems, Hard Lines, earning him national
recognition. Some of his poems reflected an
anti-establishment feeling. For example, one
verse, entitled Common Sense, asks:

    Why did the lord give us agility,
    If not to evade responsibility?

When Nash wasn’t writing poems, he made guest
appearances on comedy and radio shows and toured
the United States and England, giving lectures at
colleges and universities.

Nash was regarded respectfully by the literary
establishment, and his poems were frequently
anthologized even in serious collections such as
Selden Rodman\'s 1946 A New Anthology of Modern
Poetry.

He was a master of the surprising, pun-like rhyme,
as in his retort to Dorothy Parker\'s dictum, Men
seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses:

    A girl who is bespectacled
    She may not get her nectackled
    But safety pins and bassinets
    Await the girl who fassinets.

He often wrote in a signature verse form which
creates a comic effect with pairs of lines that
rhyme, but that are of dissimilar length and
irregular meter. His poem Portrait of the Artist
as a Prematurely Old Man uses this device to good
effect. He opens by noting

    It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and
even every Bachelor of Arts,
    That all sin is divided into two parts.
    One kind of sin is called a sin of commission,
and that is very important,
    And it is what you are doing when you are
doing something you ortant...

He develops this at some length, expounding on the
superiority of sins of commission, because

    You didn\'t get a wicked forbidden thrill
    Every time you let a policy lapse or forget to
pay a bill;
    You didn\'t slap the lads in the tavern on the
back and loudly cry Whee,
    Let\'s all fail to write just one more letter
before we go home, and this round of unwritten
letters is on me.
    No, you never get any fun
    Out of things you haven\'t done...

This verse form is reminiscent of Thomas Hood\'s
1826 poem, \"Our Village,\" which begins:

    Our village, that\'s to say not Miss
Mitford\'s village, but our village of Bullock
Smithy,
    Is come into by an avenue of trees, three oak
pollards, two elders and a withy;
    And in the middle, there\'s a green of about
not exceeding an acre and a half;
    It\'s common to all, and fed off by nineteen
cows, six ponies, thre horses, five asses, two
foals, seven pigs, and a calf!\"

Nash was the lyricist for the Broadway musical One
Touch of Venus, collaborating with librettist S.
J. Perelman and composer Kurt Weill. The show
included the notable song \"Speak Low (When You
Speak Love).\"

Nash died in 1971 and is interred in North
Hampton, New Hampshire.


Quotes


Some of Nash\'s verses have almost become
proverbial:

    The Camel has a single hump,
    The dromedary two,
    Or is it just the other way,
    I\'m never sure -- are you?

    Candy is dandy;
    But liquor is quicker

    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
    (This a parody of the poem Trees by Joyce
Kilmer)

    Philo Vance
    Needs a kick in the pants