If we are to measure poets by their distinctiveness—and for better or worse the achieving of distinctiveness is the raison d'être for most 20th-century American poetry—it simply won't do to think of Ogden Nash as a minor figure…. [His] death in 1971 left us with acres of Ogden Nashery as well as with a clear—maybe too clear—vision of how the art of light verse should be perpetrated. He created a body of work that went triumphantly against the prevailing esthetic of poetry as a lofty, Sextus-Propertius affair, and he stuck with his creation for nearly forever, thereby becoming the chief poetic practitioner of the grand mundane in our country's most successful literary magazine, The New Yorker. The New Yorker has published good and important works by most of America's most highly thought-of sobersides, but it would nonetheless have been a nothing venture without its...