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Quiz about Ogden Nash King of Light Verse
Quiz about Ogden Nash King of Light Verse

Ogden Nash, King of Light Verse Quiz


Learn more about this American writer of light verse and have a laugh along the way. You probably already know more of his lines than you think.

A multiple-choice quiz by skylarb. Estimated time: 4 mins.
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Author
skylarb
Time
4 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
402,281
Updated
Dec 03 21
# Qns
15
Difficulty
Easy
Avg Score
12 / 15
Plays
283
Awards
Top 35% Quiz
- -
Question 1 of 15
1. According to Ogden Nash, "Candy is dandy, but liquor is ____" what?

Answer: (One word, rhymes with liquor)
Question 2 of 15
2. Ogden Nash sometimes intentionally misspelled words in his poetry for comic effect.


Question 3 of 15
3. "The ___ is of the bovine ilk / One end is moo, the other, milk." What animal is this two-line poem about?

Answer: (One Word)
Question 4 of 15
4. Ogden Nash was routinely ridiculed for his light verse in his own day, and his poetry was never included in any anthology until after his death.


Question 5 of 15
5. "To keep your marriage brimming," Ogden Nash advises husbands, "with love in the loving cup, / Whenever you're wrong, admit it; / Whenever you're right," do what? Hint


Question 6 of 15
6. "Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, / And that's what ____ were created for." What belongs in the blank? Hint


Question 7 of 15
7. Ogden Nash wrote the lyrics for what song in the 1943 Broadway musical "One Touch of Venus"? Hint


Question 8 of 15
8. "No, you never get any fun / Out of the things you haven't ___." Complete this couplet by Ogden Nash.

Answer: (One word, rhymes with fun)
Question 9 of 15
9. "I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree. / Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, / I'll never see a tree at all." Whose 1913 poem was Ogden Nash parodying when he wrote these lines? Hint


Question 10 of 15
10. According to Ogden Nash, what "are indeed an irritating form of life"? Hint


Question 11 of 15
11. "Some ladies smoke too much and some ladies drink too much and some ladies pray too much, / But all ladies think they" what? Hint


Question 12 of 15
12. "Why did the Lord give us agility," Ogden Nash writes, "if not to evade" what? Hint


Question 13 of 15
13. "First a little, / Then a lottle." What would you guess this two-lined poem is titled? Hint


Question 14 of 15
14. In "Love Under the Republicans (Or Democrats)" Ogden Nash borrows a couple of lines from what poet when he beings, "Come live with me and be my love / And we will all the pleasures prove..."? Hint


Question 15 of 15
15. "Certainly there are lots of things in life that _____ won't buy, but it's very funny - / Have you ever tried to buy them without _____?" What word is missing from these two blanks? Hint



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Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. According to Ogden Nash, "Candy is dandy, but liquor is ____" what?

Answer: quicker

This seven-word poem is titled "Reflections on Ice-Breaking". Ogden Nash wrote over 600 poems, lyrics, and verses, many of them short bits like this. Fourteen volumes of his work were published between 1931 and 1972.
2. Ogden Nash sometimes intentionally misspelled words in his poetry for comic effect.

Answer: true

Ogden Nash frequently wrote in rhymed couplets, for example:

"A girl who's bespectacled
May not get her nectacled."

The above couplet is also an example of Nash's unconventional use of spelling. Here, nectacled is "neck tickled" written as a single word to sound like bespectacled.

Another example of this irregular spelling is his couplet: "If called by a panther / Don't anther." (Here, answer is spelled anther to force the rhyme and inspire a laugh.)
3. "The ___ is of the bovine ilk / One end is moo, the other, milk." What animal is this two-line poem about?

Answer: cow

Ogden Nash wrote a series of short, popular poems about animals. His first name was Frederic, but he went by his middle name of Ogden. Nash was born August 19, 1902 in Rye, New York. He attended Harvard University but dropped out after a year.
4. Ogden Nash was routinely ridiculed for his light verse in his own day, and his poetry was never included in any anthology until after his death.

Answer: false

He was actually fairly well respected by the establishment, to the point that some of his poems were even included in some serious anthologies. His work can, for example, be found in "A New Anthology of Modern Poetry" compiled by Selden Rodman in 1946.
5. "To keep your marriage brimming," Ogden Nash advises husbands, "with love in the loving cup, / Whenever you're wrong, admit it; / Whenever you're right," do what?

Answer: Shut up

This poem is titled "A Word to Husbands".

Ogden Nash held a lot of different jobs. He worked as a teacher at St. George's School, which he also attended as a youth, and sold bonds in New York. He wrote advertisements for Barron Collier and was also an editor at Doubleday.
6. "Children aren't happy with nothing to ignore, / And that's what ____ were created for." What belongs in the blank?

Answer: parents

Ogden Nash's first collection of poems, "Hard Lines", was published in 1931, the same year he married Frances Leonard. After years of moving around, Nash finally settled in Baltimore, where he lived for thirty-seven years.
7. Ogden Nash wrote the lyrics for what song in the 1943 Broadway musical "One Touch of Venus"?

Answer: Speak Low

"Empty Chairs at Empty Tables" is from "Les Miserables", "The Music of the Night" from "Phantom of the Opera", and "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" from "The Sound of Music". The music for "Speak Low" was written by the German composer Kurt Weill. A hit single of "Speak Low", featuring Guy Lombardo and his orchestra, came out in 1944 with Billy Leach singing the lead vocal. Barbra Streisand included a version of the song on her 1993 album "Back to Broadway".
8. "No, you never get any fun / Out of the things you haven't ___." Complete this couplet by Ogden Nash.

Answer: done

These lines come from "Portrait of the Artist As a Prematurely Old Man". Nash continues:

"The moral is that it is probably better not to sin at all, but if some kind of sin you must be pursuing,
Well, remember to do it by doing rather than by not doing."

This is probably a pun on the church liturgy that runs, "Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone."
9. "I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree. / Perhaps, unless the billboards fall, / I'll never see a tree at all." Whose 1913 poem was Ogden Nash parodying when he wrote these lines?

Answer: Joyce Kilmer's

Joyce Kilmer wrote "Trees", which begins "I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree." The poem is often read or recited by American schoolchildren on Arbor Day. Ogden Nash's parody, titled "Song of the Open Road", was published in an October 1932 issue of "The New Yorker". Later versions of the poem use the word "indeed" instead of "perhaps."
10. According to Ogden Nash, what "are indeed an irritating form of life"?

Answer: husbands

These lines come from the long poem "What Almost Every Woman Knows Sooner or Later", which lists the many potential faults of a husband, and finally concludes:

"Husbands are indeed an irritating form of life,
And yet through some quirk of Providence most of them are really very deeply ensconced in the affection of their wife."

This poem was included in Ogden Nash's 1935 collection "The Primrose Path."
11. "Some ladies smoke too much and some ladies drink too much and some ladies pray too much, / But all ladies think they" what?

Answer: weigh too much

These lines come from the poem "Curl up and Diet" which appeared in Nash's 1938 collection "I'm a Stranger Here Myself". The poem continues:

"They may be as slender as a sylph or a dryad,
But just let them get on the scales and they embark on a doleful jeremiad:
No matter how low the figure the needle happens to touch,
They always claim it is at least five pounds to much;
To the world she may appear slinky and feline,
But she inspects herself in the mirror and cries, Oh, I look like a sea lion."
12. "Why did the Lord give us agility," Ogden Nash writes, "if not to evade" what?

Answer: Responsibility

This two-line poem is titled "Common Sense" and was published in the poets 1931 collection "Hard Lines".

Ogden Nash's popularity was widespread enough that his work was published in both "Sports Magazine" and "The New Yorker". His "Line-Up for Yesterday" was published in the January 1949 issue of "Sports Magazine". An alphabetical poem, it begins each line with a different letter of the alphabet while listing off the baseball greats.
13. "First a little, / Then a lottle." What would you guess this two-lined poem is titled?

Answer: The Catsup Bottle

Bottle rhymes with lottle, and when you try to get catsup (ketchup) out of the bottle by slapping it, it is indeed often the case that you get a little followed by a lot.

Ogden Nash married Frances Leonard and had two children named Isabel and Linell. He died in May of 1971 because of complications from his Crohn's disease, which may have been aggravated by food poisoning.
14. In "Love Under the Republicans (Or Democrats)" Ogden Nash borrows a couple of lines from what poet when he beings, "Come live with me and be my love / And we will all the pleasures prove..."?

Answer: Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd to his Love" begins:

"Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields."

Ogden Nash's poem begins with the same two lines but then, satirically, takes a quite different direction:

"Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
Of a marriage conducted with economy
In the Twentieth Century Anno Donomy.
We'll live in a dear little walk-up flat
With practically room to swing a cat
And a potted cactus to give it hauteur
And a bathtub equipped with dark brown water.
[. . . ] We'll bus for miles on holidays
For seas at depressing matinees,
And every Sunday we'll have a lark
And take a walk in Central Park.
And one of these days not too remote
You'll probably up and cut my throat."
15. "Certainly there are lots of things in life that _____ won't buy, but it's very funny - / Have you ever tried to buy them without _____?" What word is missing from these two blanks?

Answer: money

These lines come from "The Terrible People", which begins:

"People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it,
And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.
I don't mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,
But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it."

This poem was included in Nash's 1933 collection "Happy Days". Nash's poems have been turned into children's books, including "The Tale of the Custard Dragon", "The Adventures of Isabel", and "Ogden Nash's Zoo", which includes his illustrated poems about various animals.
Source: Author skylarb

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