Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Louis Hasley

Critical Essay by Louis Hasley

SOURCE: "The Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery," in The Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 27, 1971, pp. 241-50.

In the following excerpt, Hasley examines the literary merits of Nash's poetry, evaluating themes, seriousness of subject matter, consistency in composition and editing, and Nash's elaborately artificial voice of naïveté.

A well of poor English undefiled. A fountain of fizz, fun, and frolic. A Christmas tree under a colored light wheel. Plus gentle admonitions about the p's and q's of this world….

In undertaking to write about the poems of Ogden Nash, I think one may be excused, if not exonerated, for thus trying to seize in metaphor some breath of the poet's spirit. For in the world of humorous literature he is sui generis, almost without lineage; certainly we have little critical tradition to account for how he came to be. That is, if you take the world of literature to exclude the...
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