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I am trying to imitate him here, but he is probably quite inimitable. While he may be inimitable and illimitable, it is possible to reflect on the merits of his success.
Much has to do with his mastery of rhyme. In fact, his persistent sabotage of conventional spelling was to became his signature trademark. His poems also had an intensely anti-establishment quality that resounded with many Americans, particularly during the Depression. Decades after his death, he continues to attract new readers and continues to be a popular, if not the most popular, American humorous poet.
Consider the auk; Becoming extinct because he forgot how to fly, and could only walk. Consider man, who may well become extinct Because he forgot how to walk and learned how to fly before he thinked. Why did the lord give us agility If not to evade responsibility?
Senescence begins And middle age ends The day your descendants Outnumber your friends.
I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance. The summer like a rajah dies, And every widowed tree Kindles for Congregationalist eyes An alien suttee. I have a bone to pick with Fate. Come here and tell me, girlie, Do you think my mind is maturing late, Or simply rotted early? A reference to a poem by Dorothy Parker. This is my dream, It is my own dream, I dreamt it.
I dreamt that my hair was kempt. Then I dreamt that my true love unkempt it.
Your hopeless patients will live, Your healthy patients will die. I have only this word to give: Wonder, and find out why. In both cases, they rhyme. Which perhaps is just as well because if everybody was a success nobody could be contemptuous of anybody else and everybody would start in all over again trying to be a bigger success than everybody else so they would have somebody to be contemptuous of and so on forevermore,. Nash is a great poet to turn to, for pure relaxation and fun, or to relieve stress.
Or for contemplation more about that later. You can flip open Candy Is Dandy: The Best Of Ogden Nash on any page and be instantly entertained.
Your worries will go away, at least for some time. Candy Is Dandy has an introduction by the late British novelist and essayist Anthony Burgess, who has written it in the Nash style: This bringing together of the informal and the formal is what his genius chiefly loves. Depending on her mood and disposition, the reader could actually turn thoughtful and introspective after reading some simple lines. I have already quoted from The Panther.
These are a few that I love: How does a person get to be a capable liar? That is something that I respectfully inquiar, Oh to be Machiavellian, Oh to be unscrupulous, Oh to be glib!
There came a whisper as soft as mud In the bed of an old canal: Great for browsing or, as I did, reading straight through. Now the damned make way for the double-damned Who emerge with shuffling pace From the nightmare zone of persons unknown, With neither name nor face. He appeared regularly on radio and on television, and he drew huge audiences for his readings and lectures. In his daughters gathered more than four hundred of his poems and called it I Wouldn't Have Missed It , a quote from one of his verses. The Best of Ogden Nash should delight old fans and introduce new readers to a unique talent.
Oh to be ever prepared with a plausible fib! Most project, moreover, an abiding easy-going feeling that the poet is fairly content with his quite comfortable middle-class life, even while he is poking gentle fun at it. In his most characteristic pose, Nash is a good-natured observer of the passing scene, hopeful that it is going to yield him adequate curiosities to turn into comic capital.
The sorts of things that bewilder or mildly irritate Nash point up his general contentment with things as they are.
The Best of Ogden Nash [Linell Nash Smith] on bahana-line.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. It's been more than thirty years since the appearance of a. You can flip open Candy Is Dandy: The Best Of Ogden Nash on any page and be instantly entertained. Your worries will go away, at least for.
The good life, as he pictured it, is essentially urban and essentially well-heeled. Throughout his life he enjoyed not only the popularity accorded him by his sizable readership but also the much rarer tribute of respect from his competitors in the creation of light verse. At the time of his death, in , his admirers, both amateur and professional, accorded Nash the sincerest form of flattery as, with varying degrees of success, they attempted to couch their farewell tributes in Nash-like mangled meter.
For example, poet Morris Bishop wrote:. Free from flashiness, free from trashiness, Is the essence of ogdenashiness.
Rich, original, rash and rational Stands the monument ogdenational. George Stevens notes this particularity. But he was unique—not at all like Gilbert or Lear or Lewis Carroll , still less like his immediate predecessors in America: By the same token, he was and remains inimitable—easy to imitate badly, impossible to imitate well. Prose Home Harriet Blog.
Visit Home Events Exhibitions Library. For example, poet Morris Bishop wrote: More About this Poet. Duckworth, —adds selections from Free Wheeling. Little, Brown, ; London: The Face is Familiar: Dent, ; revised edition, London: Little, Brown, ; enlarged edition, London: A Boy Is a Boy: I Wouldn't Have Missed It: