Phyllis McGinley
Phyllis McGinley was an influential American poet and author known for her engaging light verse and insightful essays. Born in Ontario, Oregon, in 1905, she found her literary voice while exploring themes of everyday life, particularly the experiences of suburban housewives. Her notable works include children's books such as *The Most Wonderful Doll in the World* and *The Year Without a Santa Claus*, as well as acclaimed poetry collections like *Times Three*, which won the Pulitzer Prize. McGinley's writing often combines humor and keen observations, offering relatable portrayals of mid-20th-century life.
Her essays, including *The Province of the Heart* and *Sixpence in Her Shoe*, reflect her views on domesticity while navigating societal expectations. McGinley's ability to make poetry accessible to a broader audience has been widely recognized, earning her numerous awards and academic honors. Throughout her career, she championed the role of women in the home, providing a counter-narrative to critiques of domestic life. McGinley's legacy continues to resonate, as her work captures the complexities of human experience with warmth and wit.
Phyllis McGinley
- Born: March 21, 1905
- Birthplace: Ontario, Oregon
- Died: February 22, 1978
- Place of death: New York, New York
Other literary forms
In addition to light verse, Phyllis McGinley wrote several books for children using a variety of different styles. These include Christmas stories, variations on traditional tales, fantasies, verse tales, and alphabet books. Some of her most popular works for children are The Most Wonderful Doll in the World (1950) and The Year Without a Santa Claus (1957).
McGinley also wrote several collections of essays. In both The Province of the Heart (1959) and Sixpence in Her Shoe (1964), she dealt primarily with the role of the housewife and with life in the suburbs. In Saint-Watching (1969), she portrayed the lives of several saints, emphasizing their warmth and humanity rather than their sanctity.
Achievements
One of Phyllis McGinley’s greatest achievements was to make poetry accessible to a wide audience. This was one of the main reasons she chose to write about everyday people and occurrences. As she commented in an interview that appeared in Time magazine in 1965: “At a time when poetry has become the property of the universities and not the common people, I have a vast number of people who have become my readers. I have kept the door open and perhaps led them to greater poetry.”
In addition to her popular success, McGinley received many academic honors and awards. The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley received the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, and Times Three won the Pulitzer Prize. She was elected a member of the National Institute for Arts and Letters and was selected to read her work at the White House. Wonderful Time was honored as one of the best books for children of 1966 by The New York Times. She received honorary doctorates from many institutions.
Biography
Although Phyllis McGinley was born in Ontario, Oregon, her family moved to a ranch near Iliff, Oregon, when she was only three months old. Both she and her brother felt isolated and friendless there because of the remote nature of her home. Although she entertained herself by developing a love for reading, she was much happier when the family moved to Ogden, Utah, after her father’s death.
After her graduation from the University of Utah, McGinley taught school in Ogden. Because she had won numerous literary awards in college, she began submitting her poetry to various national magazines. She later moved to New Rochelle, New York, and began teaching English at a junior high school. At first, her poems were lyrical and serious. An editor at The New Yorker, however, encouraged her to begin writing light verse—which had the advantage of paying more than serious poetry did. After the principal of the school objected to her moonlighting as a writer, she gave up teaching and moved to New York City, first working at an advertising agency and then accepting a job as the poetry editor at Town and Country magazine.
In 1936, McGinley married Bill Hayden, and the couple moved to the New York suburb of Larchmont. Her first daughter, Julie, was born in 1939, followed by Patsy in 1941. McGinley enjoyed her role as a housewife and mother. She incorporated her experiences into her poetry, continuing to send her work to a wide range of magazines and publishing several volumes of verse. The triumphs and tragedies of daily living became the source of much of the humor in her work.
Because McGinley often championed the role of the suburban housewife, she was frequently viewed as a defender of domesticity against the attacks of such writers as Betty Friedan, who in The Feminine Mystique (1963) equated the role of a housewife with a type of mental illness. Although McGinley, as well as some of her critics, pointed out that as a successful author, she was hardly a typical homebody. Her two books of essays, The Province of the Heart and Sixpence in Her Shoe, present witty and charming pictures of coping with daily life in the home.
After her husband died in 1972, McGinley moved to an apartment in New York City. She resided there until she died in 1978.
Analysis
One of the best modern writers of light verse, Phyllis McGinley stands out for presenting the reader with clever and recognizable portraits of the twentieth century world. Although a few of her poems are dated because they are so closely connected with a particular time period, most survive because they deal with everyday situations: visiting family, shopping, fighting with the machines in the household that never seem to work correctly, waiting in line, listening to the dentist. These poems are based on her own experiences and present a wry and witty view of urban and suburban life. However, McGinley also derives many of her poems from newspaper headlines. In fact, glancing through Times Three shows that many of her best poems were inspired by her responses to headlines that she found intriguing, humorous, or outrageous. In his introduction to this Pulitzer Prize-winning book, the poet W. H. Auden comments that she is “coolly realistic . . . she merely observes what is the case with deadly accuracy.”
McGinley’s work stands out not only for her unique perspective, but also for her technical virtuosity. She experiments successfully with many different poetic styles and rhyme forms, adapting the sonnet as easily as the nursery rhyme to her themes.
Stones from a Glass House
Stones from a Glass House collects primarily poems that were published in various magazines during the years from 1940 through 1946. The first portion of the book, “The Time Is Now,” contains sonnets describing suburban living, recording such incidents as upsets at a beauty parlor and the scene at a railroad station when the commuter train returns from New York. It both laments the problems and praises the joys of middle-class life. For example, in “The Chosen People,” the speaker uses the style and rhythm of a nursery rhyme to complain about taxes: “I’m a middle-bracket person with a middle-bracket spouse/ And we live together gaily in a middle-bracket house.” On the other hand, the speaker in “Confessions of a Reluctant Optimist” describes herself as unable to find anything to disparage about her life.
The second section, “It Seems Like Yesterday,” focuses on war poems. Although McGinley still employs the ironic language, rhythm, and style of light verse, most of these poems present serious subjects. In addition, many view war from the woman’s point of view: the wife, the mother, the villager walking through the park who mourns the absence of the young men. The elegant sonnet “Dido of Tunisia” comments not only on war’s destruction but also on its futility. “Hamburg” mourns for the destruction of that city, noting that “Gretchen for her children weeps no louder/ Than Rachel wept.”
A Short Walk from the Station
McGinley opens A Short Walk from the Station volume with an essay, “Suburbia, of Thee I Sing,” that challenges the “literary cliché” of the suburbs as a barren wasteland where conformity and hypocrisy flourish. Instead, she describes a suburb as an attractive and comfortable location, filled with ordinary people who have a mixture of virtues and vices. She emphasizes the role of such a place in raising children. Three of the sections in the book, “Landscape with Figures,” “Sonnets from Westchester,” and “Views from a Terrace,” contain both new and old poems gathered to provide examples for the thesis McGinley sets forth in the introduction. This defense does not blunt her sharp observation of the world around her. In “Reactionary Essay on Applied Science,” she parallels the major discoveries of the scientific world with those minor ones that make life simpler: “Deciding on reflection calm,/ Mankind is better off with trifles:/ With Band-Aid rather than the bomb,/ With safety match than safety rifles.”
The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley
Linda Welshimer Wagner points out that McGinley’s later poems are more technically complex than her earlier work. McGinley adopts more elements of free verse and begins to “move from accentual to syllabic verse,” where the length of the lines depends not on accented words but the total number of syllables. This gives many of the poems in The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley a greater freedom of movement and expression.
The selection of poems, as well, includes a wide range of subjects and styles. The volume begins with “Apologia,” a rather wistful acknowledgment of the need for the middle-aged to accept and even celebrate the world as it is, being thankful “for the lily,/ Spot and all.” Several other poems also deal with growing older and all that means for a mother. “Ballade of Lost Objects” begins with a catalog of items that disappear around the house, a technique McGinley often uses. However, the last line in the first stanza shifts the poem’s tone abruptly as the speaker wonders “And where in the world did the children vanish?” Another poem developing this theme even further is “The Doll House.” McGinley approaches a blank-verse style in this poem, which gives it a freer and more narrative tone. As in “Ballade of Lost Objects,” an extensive catalog of details provides a backdrop for a mother’s musings as the objects in the dollhouse remain unchanging:
The fire
Times Three
In her early books, McGinley explores themes that she would use throughout her career. One of the clearest ways to identify these subjects is to review Times Three. McGinley groups the poems she selected for inclusion both chronologically and thematically. Thus, the section titled “The Thirties” includes poems from On the Contrary and One More Manhattan. In addition, several poems from A Pocket Full of Wry and even Husbands Are Difficult are also represented here, since they were first published in popular magazines in the 1930’s. She then organizes these poems into four distinct categories. The first, “Personal Remarks,” includes humorous reflections on a wide range of subjects with universal appeal. For example, “Melancholy Reflections After a Lost Argument” cleverly captures the frustration most people experience when they come up with the perfect response just a bit too late. In “Lament of the Normal Child,” the speaker longs for a complex or fixation, since that seems the only way to attract adult attention. “On the Town,” as the title suggests, presents her portraits of urban life. “The House of Oliver Ames” contains a series of poems dealing with husbands and marriage.
The final section, “The Threadbare Times,” includes more serious subjects. “Trinity Place” uses irony to convey the suffering of the unemployed during the Depression, contrasting the pigeons who “preen” in a churchyard with the unemployed men, sitting idle on the benches: “It is only the men who are hungry. The pigeons are fed.” “Carol with Variations” was inspired by a newspaper headline, which appeared during Christmas week in 1936. It noted that the armies of the world currently contained more than 7.6 million men. She parodies several different carols to pair the original lyrics extolling peace with the realities of the decade:
Sing hosanna, sing Noel.
Bibliography
Allen, Everett S. Famous American Humorous Poets. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1968. The chapter on McGinley provides a good introduction to her work, including a biography, an evaluation of McGinley’s stature as a poet, and a discussion of her themes and style.
Bellafante, Ginia. “Suburban Rapture.” The New York Times Book Review, December 24, 2008, 23. This discussion of McGinley looks at her satisfaction with being a suburban housewife, although it notes that it was her salary that allowed her children to go to private school.
Hasley, Louis. “The Poetry of Phyllis McGinley.” Catholic World, August, 1970, 211-215. Hasley analyzes the different verse patterns that McGinley used throughout her career. He demonstrates the range of McGinley’s technical artistry by comparing her work to a set of standards for judging the various categories of light verse. He concludes that her work contains many characteristics of the Cavalier poets of the seventeenth century.
McGinley, Phyllis. “The Telltale Hearth.” Interview. Time, June 18, 1965, 74-78. In this interview, McGinley provides many anecdotes about her life, as well as describing her views on poetry, feminism, and her role in modern literature.
Richart, Bette. “The Light Touch.” Commonweal 9 (December, 1960): 277-279. Richart praises McGinley’s use of poetic devices and her technical skill in the composition of her poetry. However, she believes that McGinley’s choice of subject matter often weakens her poetry, making it trivial. She also finds McGinley’s tone in some of these works is overly complacent. Richart contrasts such light poems with McGinley’s more serious work on such topics as age and youth, such as “The Dollhouse,” a work that she ranks as serious poetry.
Semansky, Chris. “Overview of ’Reactionary Essay on Applied Science.’” In Vol. 9 of Poetry for Students. Detroit: Gale, 2000. Semansky discusses the dispassionate point of view that McGinley adopts in this poem, as well as her effective use of catalog and contrast. The entry also contains a biography and bibliography.
Sullivan, Kay. “From Suburbs to Saints: Phyllis McGinley.” Catholic World, September, 1957, 420-425. This article is a source of rich biographical detail.
Wagner, Linda Welshimer. Phyllis McGinley. New York: Twayne, 1971. Wagner identifies and analyzes the major themes in McGinley’s work throughout her career, as well as noting the technical development of her poetic skills. Several poems are analyzed. One chapter is devoted to a comparison of the characteristics of light verse and serious poetry. Although the main focus of the book is McGinley’s poetry, her essays and children’s books are also discussed briefly. A helpful chronology and annotated bibliography are included.