SOURCE: “With the Best of Intentions,” in Times Literary Supplement, February 3, 1984, p. 118.

In the following negative review, Disch notes the limited nature of Nash's verse, asserting that “measured against the general level of accomplishment in any standard anthology of humorous verse, Nash's limitations are glaringly evident.”

For the forty years of Ogden Nash's career as America's foremost white-collar humorist, the popular success of his books of light verse expressed the consensus view of the reading public anent poetry: they, too, dislike it. Dislike, that is, the oracular assumptions that most poets make, their claims to a higher wisdom, a more finely-turned awareness and larger emotions than are found to obtain elsewhere in the middle class. Nash had no such pretensions. He wrote his verses about just those subjects that a well-behaved dinner guest might use for conversational fodder in mixed company. He was the very beau idéal...