Phyllis McGinley

Jo Gill (University of Glasgow)
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“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…

868 words

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 19 March 2024.]

3046 Phyllis McGinley 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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