(2 of 10)
Providing Dream its festival hour. And while the pot of culture's
bubblesome,
Praise poets, even when they're troublesome.
Depth of Emotion. Such agile verse, composed over three decades, has established Phyllis McGinley as one of the most widely read and acclaimed poets in the U.S., with a harvest of honors that include the Pulitzer Prize, Notre Dame's Laetare Medal and more honorary degrees than she can remember (it's nine, she thinks). Although her métier is light verse, Poet W. H. Auden sets her high on the Parnassian hill. "Where do you place work like Pope's Rape of the Lock?" he asks. "You could equally call it light verse or marvelous poetry. There is a certain way of writing which one calls light, but underneath it can carry a great depth of emotion." The McGinley verse, says Poet-Anthologist Louis Untermeyer, "has something to say about what life is like—which is all we ask of poetry."
Her audience apparently agrees. The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley, first published in 1954, has sold 80,000 copies in hard cover and paperback. Times Three, the 1961 anthology embracing her life's work, has sold 60,000 in hard cover alone. From its pages gleams a talent that soars felicitously the full length of the human scheme, from man's perversity—
We might as well give up the fiction That we can argue any view.
For what in me is pure Conviction Is simple Prejudice to you.
to man's sorrows—
Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
Aimed with an angry art, Words can sting like anything. But silence breaks the heart.
to mothers and daughters—
Mothers are hardest to forgive.
Life is the fruit they long to hand you Ripe on a plate. And while you live, Relentlessly they understand you.
to the poignancy of daughters growing up—
Thirteen's no age at all. Thirteen is nothing.
It is not wit, or powder on the face, Or Wednesday matinees, or misses' clothing,
Or intellect, or grace . . .
Thirteen keeps diaries, and tropical fish (A month, at most); scorns jumpropes
in the spring; Could not, would fortune grant it, name
its wish;
Wants nothing, everything; Has secrets from itself, friends it
despises; Admits none to the terrors that it feels;
Owns half a hundred masks but no
disguises; And walks upon its heels.
Thirteen's anomalous—not that, not
this:
Not folded bud, or wave that laps a
shore,
Or moth proverbial from the chrysalis.
Is the one age defeats the metaphor.
Is not a town, like childhood, strongly
walled
But easily surrounded; is no city. Nor, quitted once, can it be quite
recalled—
Not even with pity.
For this sensitive evocation of adolescence, which its author considers her best verse, Phyllis McGinley's daughter Julie was the model. The McGinley muse, albeit a distant traveler, alights most often on the ordinary landscapes of motherhood and domesticity—the only two professions that consistently outrank the poet. Since the 1930s, Housewife Hayden has been singing the substantial pleasures of the hearth, and contentedly reminding herself
How I might, in some tall town instead, From