A Classic Player: Ogden Nash, 1902–1971

By TOWNES COATES

Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash, puckish master of American light verse, was a witty presence at The Players, where his droll observations were right at home. Best known for his whimsical, rhyme-bending poems that graced the pages of The New Yorker and Saturday Evening Post, Nash was a prolific purveyor of linguistic play.

Born in 1902 in Rye, New York, Nash claimed he began writing poetry when he couldn’t find rhymes he liked and decided to make up his own. His style—cheerfully irreverent, breezily observant, and unbound by traditional meter—earned him an enthusiastic following by the 1930s. Lines like “If called by a panther / Don’t anther” made him a favorite of readers.

Nash likewise preferred a clever turn of phrase to dictionary precision. To Dorothy Parker’s “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses” Nash replied, “A girl who’s bespectacled / May not get her nectacled.”

He joined The Players in 1936, as a writer and cultural craftsman whose audience was as broad as many of his performer colleagues. He contributed to the spirit of the clubhouse in his own manner, no surprise from the man who penned, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”

Though Nash never fancied himself a dramatist, his words made their way to the stage in several forms. He wrote lyrics for One Touch of Venus, the 1943 Kurt Weill musical that became a Broadway hit, as well as lyrics for the 1952 Bette Davis and Gary Merrill revue Two’s Company. He also wrote screen treatments and humorous verse dramas that showed his deep affection for theatrical storytelling.

Nash was known as affable, modest, and—despite his reputation as a comic poet—quietly contemplative. His humor was never mean-spirited, but gently skewered everyday frustrations: parenting, aging, marriage, bureaucracy—all observed with twinkling honesty. “Children aren’t happy with nothing to ignore, and that’s what parents were created for,” he wrote.

Nash married Frances Leonard in 1931, eventually moving his family to the Baltimore home of his in-laws. He embraced his adopted hometown, or as he put it, “I could have loved New York had I not loved Balti-more.”

Ogden Nash died in 1971, leaving behind more than 500 published poems and a singular mark on American letters.