The latest collection of Ogden Nash's hymns to Neuros ["Good Intentions"] shows no advance or mutation in technique, but it reflects a more mellow personality, a less subjective approach to life, and a deadlier, deeper wit. Humorists have a melancholy habit of anticipating old age, and although Nash cannot be much more than forty, he has definitely entered what literary historians of the future will no doubt term his "middle period." Two years ago all of Nash's earlier verse appeared in a single volume. Between that book and the present one there are sharp dividing lines. The poet sees them in the mirror when he shaves. The world sees them in his art.
First of all he has become objective, even philosophical. Always a sensitive man, he was quick to perceive that modern civilization is a bad fit for a body operated by old-fashioned instincts and he cried out in protest at what Henri Bergson called "the mechanical encrusted on the living." His earlier poems were personal laments, complaints, and he couched them in a poetic idiom which drew its form directly from the American rhythm of complaint….
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