My Favorite Poet: Ogden Nash

Although I have been inspired by the Edgar Allen Poe's sardonic nature and his rather curious life, I have always been a fan of Ogden Nash. While reading the book "The Best of Ogden Nash" by his daughter, Linell Nash Smith, I even became more endeared to the late poet and realized why my poetry nearly always has to rhyme.

As a child, I had a thirst for knowledge and learning and loved playing games like "Go to the Head of the Class" and later on the likes of "Trivial Pursuit" and other games where thinking rather than luck prevailed. I remember watching "What's My Line" back in the 1950's with my grandmother and shouting out the answers much to her surprise. Being an only child, I read everything I could get my hands on including the cereal boxes, can labels and anything that had words. One of the members of the panel of "What's My Line" was Ogden Nash who was introduced as the publisher of Doubleday. Whenever he was on, he would give the audience a line or two of his witty poetry. I remember loving this bespectacled grandfatherly figure and loving his poems that with merely a few words, made us laugh, even if some words were foreign to our ears, they always rhymed.

Some of his best works from my memory are;

Candy

Is dandy

But liquor

Is quicker.

Nash wrote about things one would see every day. He wrote about animals, people, and life in general. One of my favorites is a poem called;

"I Yield To My Learned Brother or Is There a Candlestick Maker
in the House?"

From this multi-lined poem about professional people I find my personal favorite stanza;

The noblest lord is ushered in
By the practicing physician,
And the humblest lout is ushered out
By a certified mortician.
And in between, they find their foyers
Alive with summonses from lawyers.

From this one poem, we see how he appealed to the everyday man as well as the hierarchy of learning. He had a whimsical quality that could appeal to a child as well as an adult. Ogden Nash passed away in 1971 from Crohn's disease at Johns Hopkins Hospital in his beloved town of Baltimore. After a brief time in New York, he went back to Baltimore and in his words; "I could have loved New York had I not loved Balti-more."