'What Remains Constant But Buffoonery?'

Like every human endeavor, literature is subject to snobbery. We’re all snotty about something, whether colleges or cocktails. Take poetry, starting with formalists versus free versers. Poets, readers and critics partial to various schools often agree to look down their sophisticated noses at light verse. After all, poetry is a serious business and shouldn’t be left in the hands of lightweight amateurs. 

I understand: art is not a democracy. Popularity does not mean quality. In fact, the opposite is most often true. But recall that there was a time when newspapers, magazines and church bulletins routinely published light verse. Much was doggerel but don't knock even a nanosecond of amusement. For decades The New Yorker specialized in light verse. Among its regulars was Ogden Nash.

 

Even my father, not exactly a litterateur, knew Nash’s best-known lines, written in 1931, late in the Prohibition era: “Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker.” I know my father knew the poem because in 1968 Nash added a line, “Pot is not,” and it was judged worthy of being reported in our newspaper. My father recited the poem aloud, adding the appended line, and laughed – a memorably rare event. I too had already committed it to memory. Here’s another Nash production I like even more: “In chaos sublunary / What remains constant but buffoonery?” Silly and profound, a nice gloss on Shakespeare.

 

Nash’s first collection of poems, published in 1931, had an excellent title: Hard Lines. I don’t know Nash’s biography well but I wonder about the significance of his arrival as a poet coinciding with the direst years of the Great Depression. The book went through seven printings in its first year, suggesting a lot of cash-strapped readers were open to the occasional guffaw. Nash claimed to think in rhymes and is known for inventing them when convenient. Consider “The Literary Scene,” a 1954 sequence of five poems on bookish themes. In the third he nods to a precursor, Lewis Carroll:

 

“In imperial boudoirs

The heroine noudoirs.

For so mimsy a babe

The womraths outgrabe.”

 

Elsewhere in the sequence he rhymes “brain” with “Mickey Spillane,” “rathskeller” with “best-seller,” and “ugly courtiers” with “behind the portieres.” Here’s my favorite, the fourth poem:

 

"How many miles to Babylon?

Love-in-a-mist and Bovril.

Are there more Sitwells than one?

Oh yes, there are Sacheverell.”

 

I know the coterie of readers who appreciate a good cheap shot at the Sitwells is microscopic. Still, that made my day or at least thirty seconds of it.

 

Nash died on this date, May 19, in 1971 at age sixty-eight.