Very little comic poetry comes off—very little poetry of any kind comes off, actually, but the success ratio is higher in the straight kind—for preoccupation with the short, escapable, unimportant periods when life is funny to the exclusion of the long, inescapable, important periods when it is serious implies, ultimately (and sometimes immediately), mediocre taste. It is a shock, therefore, to hear that Ogden Nash bears the awesome title of America’s Most Quoted Poet...

Nash’s let-down rhymes and wait-for-it metrics are perfect stylistic equivalents for the missing chairs and slow burns of which civilized masculine living is compounded: waiting for women, putting up with children, social boredom and humiliation, having to work, the agenbite of inwit... He is, in fact, in line with those humorists who make you laugh at things not because they are funny but because laughing at them makes it easier to stand them—which is, I suppose, the same as calling him a sort of honorary serious writer after all.