Frederic Ogden Nash was an American poet well known for his light verse, of which he wrote over 500 pieces. With his unconventional rhyming schemes, he was declared by The New York Times the country's best-known producer of humorous poetry.

Biography

After a year at Harvard University (1920–21), Nash held a variety of jobs—advertising, teaching, editing, bond selling—before the success of his poetry enabled him to work full-time at it. He sold his first verse (1930) to The New Yorker, on whose editorial staff he was employed for a time. With the publication of his first collection, Hard Lines (1931), he began a 40-year career during which he produced 20 volumes of verse with such titles as The Bad Parents’ Garden of Verse (1936), I’m a Stranger Here Myself (1938), and Everyone but Thee and Me (1962). Making his home in Baltimore, he also did considerable lecturing on tours throughout the United States. He wrote the lyrics for the musicals One Touch of Venus (1943) and Two’s Company (1952), as well as several children’s books.

His rhymes are jarringly off or disconcertingly exact, and his ragged stanzas vary from lines of one word to lines that meander the length of a paragraph, often interrupted by inapposite digressions. He said he learned his prosody from the unintentional blunders of the notoriously slipshod poet Julia Moore, the “Sweet Singer of Michigan.”