Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash was an American poet known for short, witty light verse built on deliberately mismatched line lengths and outrageous rhymes. Across more than fourteen books published from 1931 onwards, he produced thousands of poems that combined household observation with absurdist phrasing, and his work appeared regularly in The New Yorker for several decades.

Born in Rye, New York, in 1902, he attended Harvard for one year before leaving for financial reasons. He worked in advertising, bond sales, and editorial roles at Doubleday before publishing his first poetry collection, Hard Lines, in 1931. The book sold strongly enough to let him commit to writing full time.

Volumes such as The Bad Parents' Garden of Verse, I'm a Stranger Here Myself, and You Can't Get There from Here made him one of the best-paid magazine poets in the United States. He also collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill and the librettist S. J. Perelman on the 1943 Broadway musical One Touch of Venus, which produced the standard "Speak Low."

His verse for children, including The Tale of Custard the Dragon, kept his work in classroom anthologies long after his death in Baltimore in 1971. Among the lines most often quoted from him are the couplet on the cow as "a four-legged creature so bovine that moo seems an understatement" and the often-cited "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

The forename Ogden is an English surname-turned-given-name from Old English ac, meaning oak, and denu, meaning valley, so it can be read as "oak valley." It was uncommon as a personal name even in his own lifetime, and his published output is the reason most readers encounter the name attached to a man at all.