Word: nash
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...have no private life and no personality," Nash once joked. In fact, he was a quiet and often private man, even though he spent much of his career on the lecture circuit. He would recite his marvelously serpentine and breathlessly amuck alexandrines like a tenor testing the limit of his lungs, terminating at last in a long-awaited gong of rhyme. His versifications made the bespectacled and gamesomely civilized poet something of a celebrity. His accent ("clam chowder of the East Coast-New England with a little Savannah at odd moments") was sometimes heard on radio's "Information, Please...
...Nash summered on the coast of New Hampshire and, when not traveling, settled for winter into his Baltimore town house. Some of his verse reflected a playful tenderness toward his wife...
...Nash came into his metier after a spotty early career. Born in Rye, N.Y., into a family with a pre-Revolutionary pedigree, he attended St. George's School in Newport, R.I., and then became "a quarterbred Harvard alumnus"-he dropped out after freshman year. He returned to teach briefly at St. George's, where, he said, "I lost my entire nervous system carving lamb for a table of 14-year-olds." He tried selling bonds in New York; later there was a job writing streetcar advertising, which led him to the advertising department of the publishers Doubleday, Doran...
...Nash always enjoyed that consummate reward, the honor and respect of his friendly rivals in the making of light verse. Poet Morris Bishop offered a tribute in Nash's own language...
Died. Ogden Nash, 68, American master of light verse and champion of the outrageous rhyme (see THE NATION...