biography
| name: |
Nash, (Frederic) Ogden
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1902–71)
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| biography:
| Humorous writer, born in Rye, New York, USA. He studied at Harvard, then tried teaching, editing, selling bonds, and copy writing, before his poetry became successful enough for him to make a living from it. Taking outrageous liberties with the English language (‘I would live all my life in nonchalance and insouciance / Were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance’), he soon became the most popular modern versifier, frequently published in the New Yorker, whose sophisticated tone he helped establish. His subject-matter was the everyday life of middle-class America, which he described in a witty and acute manner, in an idiosyncratic style involving long digressions and striking rhyme schemes. He published many collections, including Hard Lines (1931) and Parents Keep Out: Elderly Poems for Youngerly Readers (1951). |
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