Critical Essay | Critical Essay by The New York Times Book Review

Critical Essay by The New York Times Book Review

The informing material of Ogden Nash's "Hard Lines" is the old material of two decades of American satirists. Like Mencken, Mr. Nash is anti-clerical, but a little more anti-Protestant than anti-Papist. He is also anti-work, anti-Senate, anti-aviation, anti-Tammany, anti-Rotarian, anti-vice crusading, and anti-Rudy Vallee. But if Mr. Nash is a member of the civilized minority in his hates, his technique sets him apart from the routineer methods of hawking these staple antipathies. He has … achieved the first new note in light verse that has come into our literature in a long time.

Mr. Nash's trick is an easy one and quite possibly—indeed, very probably—the parodists and imitators will run it into the ground as quickly as the Dorothy Parker last line cold douche was run into the ground. But the future shouldn't be allowed to dampen the spirits of the readers of "Hard Lines." Besides, there is more to...
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