ch is that I think it is much nicer to have a nice Christmas than to blow somebody to pesis." The poem proceeds to cite Tokyo's geopolitical saber rattling toward the Republic of China, the Loyalists and Rebels (in Spain), Der Feuhrer's "sportsmanship," and FDR's "Supreme Courtsmanship" as examples of shoving that are ill-suited to December 25 and should be reserved, as the poem says, for December 26. The point is that Nash is weighing in on phenomena of human cruelty that do violence to the potentialities of human love. His approach is humorous, but the fact is that "Merry Christmas" becomes an exercise in what Hawkins refers to as "compressed narration," which as the term implies is a linguistic device that is meant to tell a story. "Supreme Courtsmanship," for example, entails a full range of political controversy over FDR's attempt to reconfigure the Supreme Court and save some New Deal programs from being declared unconstitutional (Leuchtenburg 232-7).
Not all of Nash's poetry is so pointedly an exercise in commentary on serious political issues of the day. However, in each volume considered in this research, Nash does deal with conflicts and frustrations of modern life that are a function of the poet's (and the readers') common membership in a shared culture. In a broad sense, the ironic attitude of the poems can be seen as a coping strategy, or a survival mechanism that tends toward small victories over, and more general optimism in the face of, those aspects of human experience over which most people have no control. Indeed, as Stuart suggests (passim), Nash experienced a good deal of personal and career frustration, notably in his being overlooked for a Pulitzer Prize and in his profound feeling of outsider status amid the vagaries of Hollywood script writing.
Each of the collections under discussion in this research contains selections that deal in some manner with the joys and frustrations of sleep, itself a joy and fru...