Odgen Nash at Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles in 1949, Los Angeles Daily News, Wikipedia “Ogden Nash”, licensed https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

(18) HUMOROUS POETRY – OGDEN NASH

Reflections on Ice Breaking

Candy

Is dandy

But liquor

Is quicker

Let there be light verse!

We all love light verse or humorous poetry – “Light poetry or light verse is…usually brief, can be on a frivolous or serious subject, and often feature word play incuding puns, adventurous rhyme, and heavy alliteration”.

“While light poetry is sometimes condemned as doggerel or thought of as poetry composed casually, humor often makes a serious point in a subtle or subversive way. Many of the most renowned “serious” poets, such as Horace, Swift, Pope, and Auden, also excelled at light verse.”

When it comes to light verse or humorous poetry, I usually think of Lewis Carroll and Edmund Lear, the latter popularizing the limerick (although he did not use that term) – but above all, I think of Ogden Nash.

“Nash was best known for surprising, pun-like rhymes, sometimes with words deliberately misspelled for comic effect” – or his “fondness for crafting his own words whenever rhyming words did not exist”.

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)