With some poets it is difficult to figure out why they are popular. This is especially true those poets who operate primarily within the more lofty academic spectrum. You know, the kinds of poets form whom you require a dictionary and access to the internet nearby in order to understand what they just wrote, much less what they wrote is supposed to mean. With other poets, it is as easy to understand their popularity as it is to understand the poetry. Take, for instance, this perfectly representative verse of Ogden Nash:
I've never seen an abominable snowman,
I'm hoping not to see one,
I'm also hoping, if I do,
That it will be a wee one
Aside, perhaps, from some snooty college professor types, who could not enjoy such a delightful poem? It is easily understood, is funny and even manages to rhyme which is rare even for a lot of song lyrics these days. Yes, understanding the popular appeal of this poem by Nash—which is in no way remarkable for the way it differs from the bulk of work—is easy work. He’s a fun poet; kind of a Dr. Suess for grown-ups. His poetry is almost always funny and he’s not afraid to invent nonsense words just like Seuss when there is no workable alternative to be found in the Merriam-Webster.
Nash worked for years in advertising and so honed his craft among those charged with creating pithy slogans and memorable jingles. While some might view this as the last place a writer should go to learn how to write poetry, the exact opposite proved true for Nash. Consider the properties of effective advertising copy: it needs to convey as much useful information as possible in as few words as possible. Unless the ambition is to write the next great epic, writing advertising copy and writing poetry are not that different. Nash recognized that advertising has great lessons to teach about both what to do and what not to do when the skills learned were applied to poetry. Jettisoning much of what he learned to do while writing copy, the two most important lessons Nash took from his day job was the value of using words as economically as possible and to always write with the purpose of selling an idea.
Here’s the thing about Ogden Nash, though. While he is clearly a poet for the average person—and even a poet for the people who hate poetry—he has actually long been held in fairly high esteem by even some of the snootier professorial types. Why? Let’s return to the poem above for a quick study in just what makes Nash so deceptive brilliant.
The poem is comprised of just 25 words and—and this is key—of those 25 words, 24 could probably be understood by the average first grader. The poem seems a bit weak because two of the lines end in the same word and we’ve all been taught that it is a lazy poet who tries to rhyme a word with a word. Except that Nash isn’t trying to rhyme “one” with “one.” The poem does rhyme, but it uses the more sophisticated internal rhyme. Nash is even slyer: he places the internal rhymes right next to those two end words that are really just one word. The effect is one that sounds like the poem is constructed with a conventional end rhyme. “See one” and “wee one” sound like a rhyme, though clearly they are not. So he uses his mastery of language to get you there. But what makes this poem worthy of scholarly respect is what this economy of words and sophisticated rhyming tricks tries—and succeeds—in selling.
The poem is selling its final line. The last line offers one of Nash’s trademark humorous twists at the end but there is really more to the twist than meets the eye. Everything in the poem seems to lead to those last two words which seem to be rhyme but really aren’t, except for the one word and that one word is just plain funny to hear: “wee.” Let’s face it: “wee” is funny; in addition to being an odd synonym for small, it is also humorous for its connotations with urination. Here, however, it is used precisely to mean small. Not just small, but very small. Smaller than average, at least. The word needs to be precise in order to have the greatest humorous impact, but in addition Nash also chooses it for the purpose of the poem’s one rhyme. But the genius of the poem lies in the fact that it is only precise for the purpose for humor; otherwise, it is woefully lacking in precision. In fact, it is utterly appropriate. What Nash is selling with those last two words is the way that the English language is manipulated to create meaning where it does not actually exist. The phrase “wee one” is only funny if it presents an image that is exactly the opposite of what one picture when one hears the phrase “abominable snowman.” In reality, nothing about those two words indicates size.
According to a strict definition of abominable, the fearsome snowman could just as well be wee one as an enormous one. Only through repetitive association of the two words together has abominable come to mean huge and ferocious and even that wildly inaccurate definition is almost always applied specifically when it precedes the word “snowman.” And that’s just one random poem by one of most brilliant poetic engineers to ever work in the English language.
