Poetic Style
Nash was best known for surprising, pun-like rhymes, sometimes with words deliberately misspelled for comic effect, as in his retort to Dorothy Parker's humorous dictum, Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses:
- A girl who is bespectacled
- She may not get her nectacled
He often wrote in an exaggerated verse form with pairs of lines that rhyme, but are of dissimilar length and irregular meter:
- Once there was a man named Mr. Palliser and he asked his wife, May I be a gourmet?
- And she said, You sure may,
Nash's poetry was often a playful twist of an old saying or poem. For one example, he expressed this playfulness in what is perhaps his most famous rhyme, a twist on Joyce Kilmer's verse: "I think that I shall never see / a poem lovely as a tree", which drops "billboard" in place of poem and adds, "Indeed, unless the billboards fall / I'll never see a tree at all." That same playfulness produced a number of often quoted quips, including "Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long" and "People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up."
Read more about this topic: Ogden Nash
Famous quotes containing the words poetic and/or style:
“Metaphysics abstracts the mind from the senses, and the poetic faculty must submerge the whole mind in the senses. Metaphysics soars up to universals, and the poetic faculty must plunge deep into particulars.”
—Giambattista Vico (1688–1744)
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)