Ogden Nash's Verses for The Carnival of the Animals

During his lifetime, Ogden Nash (born August 19, 1902; died May 19, 1971) was the most widely known, appreciated, and imitated American creator of light verse, a reputation that has continued after his death. Few writers of light or serious verse can claim the same extensive dissemination of their poems that Nash’s works enjoy, both with and without citation of the author. Certain Nash lines, such as “If called by a panther, / Don’t anther” 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?” Nash’s peculiar variety of poetic buffoonery combines wit and imagination with eminently memorable rhymes.

Any attempt to place Nash’s work in the context of other American humorous writing, or the humor of any other country, for that matter, tends initially to highlight his singularity. George Stevens notes this particularity. “Nash was not the only writer who could make frivolity immortal. But he was unique—not at all like Gilbert or Lear or Lewis Carroll, still less like his immediate predecessors in America: Dorothy Parker, Margaret Fishback, Franklin P. Adams. By the same token, he was and remains inimitable—easy to imitate badly, impossible to imitate well.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation

Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns (/sæ̃ˈsɒ̃(s)/ 9 October 1835 – 16 December 1921) was a French composer, organist, conductor and piano prodigy of the Romantic era. His best-known works include Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso (1863), the Second Piano Concerto (1868), the First Cello Concerto (1872), Danse macabre (1874), the opera Samson and Delilah (1877), the Third Violin Concerto (1880), the Third ("Organ") Symphony (1886) and The Carnival of the Animals (1886).

-bio via Wikipedia

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