Werner quoted a bit of Ogden Nash in the first thread, but here are a few more examples.
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Certain Nash lines, such as “If called by a panther, / Don’t anther,” and “In the vanities / No one wears panities,” and “Candy / Is dandy, / But liquor / Is quicker” have become bits of popular American folklore. As Nash remarked in a late verse, the turbulent modern world has much need for the relief his whimsy offers: “In chaos sublunary / What remains constant but buffoonery?” ...
In Nash’s verse the unusual usages are wild; the standard cliches, literary borrowings, and moralistic saws of banal poetry become altered and refocused[,] with hilarious effects and considerable loss of the expected conventional moral relevance[,] in such lines as “A good way to forget today’s sorrows / is by thinking hard about tomorrow’s,” or “When I consider how my life is spent / I hardly ever repent.” The reader’s expectations are constantly overturned: “A man is very dishonorable to sell himself / for anything other than quite a lot of pelf.”
Hard Lines also shows the variety of ways in which Nash first demonstrated his cheerful sabotage of conventional spelling[,] which was to be his trademark. Orthography yields to phonology in such lines as “Philo Vance / needs a kick in the pance”; “Many an infant that screams like a calliope / could be soothed by a little attention to its diope”; and “Like an art lover looking at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre / is the New York Herald Tribune looking at Mr. Herbert Houvre.” ...
The Bad Parents’ Garden of Verse, which appeared in 1936, expresses a variety of new concerns. His wife had borne him two baby girls by this time, and Nash, in his role as protective father, had developed new views on boys. In “Song to be Sung by the Father of Six-months-old Female Children,” the father of girls expresses a special anxiety about the unknown little boy baby who may someday marry his daughter: “I never see an infant (male), / a-sleeping in the sun, / Without I turn a trifle pale / and think, is he the one?” Nash the father fantasizes about tormenting the wooer-to-be of his daughter: “Sand for his spinach I’ll gladly bring, / and tabasco sauce for his teething ring … ” until the potential courter decides that “perhaps he’ll struggle through fire and water / to marry somebody else’s daughter.” ...
The sounds of words also lead Nash into conscious spelling errors in order to maintain the phonic accuracy of his rhyme. Such spelling appears in the limerick “Arthur,” from
Many Long Years Ago:There was an old man of Calcutta,
Who coated his tonsils with butta,
Thus converting his snore
From a thunderous roar
To a soft, oleaginous mutta. ...
At the time of his death, in 1971, his admirers, both amateur and professional, accorded Nash the sincerest form of flattery as, with varying degrees of success, they attempted to couch their farewell tributes in Nash-like mangled meter. For example, poet Morris Bishop wrote:
Free from flashiness, free from trashiness,
Is the essence of ogdenashiness.
Rich, original, rash and rational
Stands the monument ogdenational. ...
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ogden-nash
