“Phyllis McGinley needs no puff”, insists poet W.H. Auden in his foreword to McGinley's 1960 book Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades, “her poems are known and loved by tens of thousands. They call for no learned exegesis”. Celebrated and successful in her life time (her collection The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley sold more than 80,000 copies while Times Three was awarded the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), McGinley's work seems now to have disappeared from public and critical view. It is the subject of just one scholarly study, Linda Wagner's early and brief Phyllis McGinley (1971), and appears only occasionally in works of feminist cultural history (Walker 1985) and as a footnote in studies of her near-contemporaries, Sylvia Plath (Bryant 2007) and Anne Sexton (Gill 2007). Nevertheless, Phyllis McGinley was a significant...
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Citation: Gill, Jo. "Phyllis McGinley". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 March 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3046, accessed 09 June 2026.]
