A "Good Bad Poet"

I think that I shall never see
A billboard as lovely as a tree.
Perhaps unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all.

That, of course, is by Ogden Nash. There's a new biography of the man out, which The New Yorker loftily calls 'a sympathetic appraisal', adding: "A fixture of this magazine for many decades, Ogden Nash was a nimble master of light verse. He abandoned early dreams of literary greatness, and chose, he once said, to become 'a good bad poet, rather than a bad good poet.' Blessed with a gentle, deflationary wit, Nash took aim at what he called the 'minor idiocies of humanity,' skewering the affectations of middle-class American life."