Ogden Nash is the only American except Walt Whitman who has created a new poetic form and has imposed it on the world. The Nashean stanza was foreshadowed, to be sure, by Swift and Gilbert, but then America was foreshadowed before Columbus….

Our author's technique deserves more scholarly analysis than it has received. It depends essentially on rhyme. While most modern poets have been discarding rhyme as an undue restriction on inspiration, Nash recognizes in his readers a delight matching his own in the rime riche or the rime millionnaire, and an ability to carry a rhyme-expectation through a hundred-word line to its triumphant and astounding satisfaction. "Everyone but Thee and Me" includes one of the greatest of Nashean rhymes, "see-saw" with "frisson."

The book follows the tradition of the jester with cap and bells, the wise man pretending to be simple-minded, thus reversing the more usual case...