Birthday of Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash was born 108 years ago today.

The New Yorker magazine has always benefited from a surfeit of humor writers. Contributors in the first half of the century included James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley (as himself and under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes), and Ogden Nash.

The witty contributions of these and other individuals established the magazine’s attitude in its first decade. As Harold Ross starkly noted, “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about.”

That being the case, a new chapter in American literature began in 1925. Within the magazine’s first decade, Ogden Nash was the epitome of what the New Yorker sought as a contributor. And although Nash published on his own and in other magazines over his lifetime, his work appeared hundreds of times in The New Yorker. 

Nash was born in Rye, New York, and attended Harvard briefly, but his humor and his cadence were not taught to him; rather, they were simply his gifts.

Nash wrote a zoo of poetic animal observations, among them The Turtle:

The turtle lives ‘twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.

In 1952, the Saturday Evening Post published another example from Nash’s bestiary, The Chipmunk:

My friends all know that I am shy,
But the chipmunk is twice as shy as I.
He moves with flickering indecision
Like stripes across the television.
He’s like the shadow of a cloud,
Or Emily Dickinson read aloud.
Yet his ultimate purpose is obvious, very:
To get back to his chipmonastery.

Nash was a master at stretching meters, meanings, and spellings. And while his most fun poems will not beat the reader over the head with multitiered symbols and vast extended allegories, his structure is carnivalesque in that it parodies more traditional styles.

- Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery