A Gleeful Splash of Ogden Nash

To lend allure to his decoys.

This grownup man, with pluck and luck

Is hoping to outwit a duck.

For my money, poetry doesn't get much better than that, whether "light" or "serious," and Nash did just that for four more decades, until his death in Baltimore on May 19, 1971. It was often said during his lifetime that he and Robert Frost were the only American poets who were able to support themselves and their families on the income from their work as poets, a claim that almost certainly cannot be made for a single American poet today, with the possible exception of Billy Collins. In just about all other respects Nash and Frost could not have been more different, but we can look back on them now as the last vestiges of an age when poetry still mattered in the United States, not just to academics and other poets but to the great mass of ordinary readers.

To say that Nash mattered in my own family is gross understatement. My parents -- like Nash, members of the educated but far from wealthy middle class -- awaited each new issue of the New Yorker with the eager expectation that a new Nash poem would be found therein. For a couple of summers my family vacationed on New Hampshire's tiny coastline, where my father chatted up the great man on the beach. I caught the infection as a teenager and in high-school senior English wrote my class paper on Nash. My teacher, whom I revered, declared that "your comments are delicate and restrained," that "you express your admiration for Mr. Nash tastefully and with tact," and handed me an A-, a truly rare event in my sorry academic history.

That same teacher also noted, tactfully, that Nash's "poetic credo is perhaps stated in 'Very Like a Whale' and perhaps will interest you." This poem is indeed a key to Nash. It begins, "One thing that literature would be greatly the better for/ Would be a more restrained employment by authors of simile and metaphor," takes note of Byron's "the Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold" and then takes exception to it -- "No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;/ Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof woof?" -- and closes with a flourish:

That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets, from Homer to Tennyson;

They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison.

And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket after a winter storm.

Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,

And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly

What I mean by too much metaphor and simile.