Dr Seuss tried to dissuade a young Anthony Hecht from pursuing a career as a poet. The Cat in the Hat author was a family friend, and the young Hecht’s parents, not happy with their son’s poetic ambitions, asked the children’s author to have a word. He was unsuccessful: Hecht […]
The best Longfellow poems Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most popular and influential American poets of the nineteenth century. Longfellow (1807-82) is best-known for The Song of Hiawatha, and for growing a beard to hide the marks of a family tragedy, but he also wrote many other celebrated […]
The greatest rhymes of Ogden Nash The great American comic poet Ogden Nash (1902-71) can wrote a great number of short poems, though they were not all classics. However, at his finest, Nash is a comic genius who can achieve that rare thing: to evince audible laughter from the reader. […]