Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades
by Phyllis McGinley
Summary
Times Three collects seventy new poems Phyllis McGinley added to a selection chosen from three earlier decades of light verse, all of it built around the world she actually lived in: a commuter suburb, a marriage, two daughters, and the small domestic comedies she had spent thirty years turning into poems. W. H. Auden wrote the foreword, and he placed her in surprising company, finding in her work a sensibility closer to Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf than to any other writer of comic verse, an unusual comparison for a poet best known for rhymed jokes about car pools and cocktail parties.
McGinley writes in strict rhyme and meter, the traditional tools of light verse, and uses them to argue, gently but seriously, that a life spent raising children in a New York suburb deserved the same close attention a more solemn poet might give to war or grief. Before she married and settled into that suburban life she had worked as an advertising copywriter and a schoolteacher in New York, and both jobs left a trace in her verse: a compression more often found in advertising copy, and a patience for the reader who needs a joke's timing managed rather than explained outright. Auden singled out her "dexterous, unostentatious rhyming" in his foreword, praise aimed less at cleverness than at how invisibly her technical skill does its work.
Reading the book means moving quickly through short, funny poems that reveal more craft on a second look than their light tone advertises at first. It suits a reader who wants real wit and formal skill rather than difficulty, and who is curious about a poet who insisted, at a moment when few critics agreed with her, that domestic life deserved to be taken as seriously in verse as any grander subject.
Historical Context & Significance
Times Three won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, making McGinley the first poet honored specifically for a collection of light verse, an unusual recognition for a mode most critics of the time treated as minor next to more serious, difficult poetry.
McGinley had already been elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1955, and Time magazine put her on its cover in June 1965, unusual attention for any poet. She went on to receive the University of Notre Dame's Laetare Medal in 1964 and the Catholic Book Club's Campion Award in 1967, honors that recognized her as a Catholic writer of domestic life as much as a poet, and her Pulitzer remains cited whenever critics revisit whether light verse gets taken seriously enough.