Critical Essay | Critical Review by Frank Kermode

Critical Review by Frank Kermode

SOURCE: “Maturing Late or Simply Rotted Early?” in The Spectator, Vol. 273, September 24, 1994, pp. 36-7.

In the following review of Nash's collected poems, Kermode deems Nash's short, humorous verses tedious yet amusing.

I try to imitate him here, but he is probably           quite inimitable. My own talent for this sort of thing being           limited and his virtually illimitable.

So Anthony Burgess in his Nashian introduction to this rather large selection, first published in 1983 and now out in paperback. Burgess does pretty well, but is right to feel that he doesn't sound very like the real thing. As he points out, Nash, being American, wrote a slightly different language. He will consider ‘despotic’ and ‘Arctic’, a good rhyme, also ‘want’ and ‘haunt’ (though well-spoken Englishmen of a century back might not have questioned this one). Moreover, he goes in for rhymes that frequently entail the joky modification...
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