SOURCE: Introduction to I Wouldn't Have Missed It; Selected Poems of Ogden Nash, Little, Brown, and Company, 1972, pp. vii-ix.

In the excerpt below, MacLeish argues that Nash did not write "light verse," but rather invented a unique, inimitable form that represented his times.

Ogden Nash's admirable obituary in the New York Times appeared under the heading "Master of Light Verse Dies." There are three things wrong with those five words. Nash's most important and most characteristic work is not in "verse." It is not "light." And his mastery, which was real enough, had nothing to do with a combination of the two. It consisted in the invention of a form, uniquely his own, which defied all the categories and, far more than that, altered the sensibility of his time: a form like the magic shoes in a Celtic tale which enable the wearer to enter an untraveled world...