Ogden Nash was one of the most popular poets in the English-speaking world at one time, but this is the first full-length biography. Apart from a rather odd encounter with Ezra Pound, his world hardly impinged on that inhabited by the poets from Eliot to Lowell whose work formed the critically approved canon in his lifetime. The difference can be seen from the index to Douglas M Parker’s book, which includes such figures unfamiliar to literature as Bette Davis, Jeanette MacDonald and the wonderfully named Mortimer Snerd.

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