SOURCE: "End of the Old Vaudeville," in The New Republic, Vol. 167, No. 15, October 21, 1972, p. 33.

In the following excerpt, Whittemore singles out Nash for his distinct verse and voice, the qualities by which Whittemore measures 20th-century poets, and describes Nash's legacy to the genre of American light verse.

If we are to measure poets by their distinctiveness—and for better or worse the achieving of distinctiveness is the raison d'être for most 20th-century American poetry—it simply won't do to think of Ogden Nash as a minor figure. He is as distinctive as Cummings, and will perhaps be around as long as Cummings. He was slightly younger but not much, and his death in 1971 left us with acres of Ogden Nashery as well as with a clear—maybe too clear—vision of how the art of light verse should be perpetrated. He created a body of work that...