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| "I rise to defend/ The quite possible She." |
"When Phyllis McGinley, a pleasant matron of 60 who could pass for 45 and does not try to, a woman who just misses being pretty and does not care, presents herself at the White House, she will find herself on a program that includes only one other poet —Mark Van Doren. Asked to recite one of her own poems, she chose "In Praise of Diversity," written for a Columbia University commencement, which ends:
Praise what conforms and what is odd,
Remembering, if the weather worsens
Along the way, that even God
Is said to be three separate Persons.
Then upright or upon the knee,
Praise Him that by His Courtesy,
For all our prejudice and pains,
Diverse His Creature still remains." [1]
McGinley was Time magazine's cover story on 18 June 1965. President Lyndon Johnson was hosting a White House arts festival at which poet Robert Lowell had for political reasons declined to appear. [2, 3]
As for the poem "In Praise of Diversity," McGinley seriously meant diversity of the type that's topical right now.
In 1958 Sylvia Plath listed her competitors for the title of Poetess of America: Sappho and Dickinson; among the living, "poetic godmothers" Edith Sitwell and Marianne Moore. Then she added, "Phyllis McGinley is out -- light verse; she's sold herself." [Journals, 360] Today we wonder why she was in Plath's pantheon at all.
Long forgotten, McGinley (1905-78) was the U.S. mid-century's most popular "housewife poet" who sang in rhyme the joys of being a wife and mother in the leafy suburbs, but also of the annoyance when someone bought and leveled the leafy lot across the street. Genuine wit and fiendish technical skill got her elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters and won her the 1961 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Times Three. It was the first Pulitzer ever for a book of light verse.
Back then "light verse" meant "domestic" poems written by a woman from a woman's point of view, suitable as day-brighteners in women's magazines. While Adrienne Rich in her first two books of poems (1951, 1955) wrote "he" when she meant "she" or "I," McGinley ran with the feminine pronouns, writing bestselling poetry books and children's books and collecting royalties from multiple publishers, and without any doubt influencing Sylvia Plath.
McGinley, born in Oregon, having sold some poems to New York magazines moved there in 1929. The New Yorker prodded her: "We are taking your poem, but why do you sing the same sad songs all lady poets sing?" [4] McGinley's housewife persona became Sylvia's business model: wife, mother, and New Yorker poet publishing in litmags as well as the slicks, writing children's classics, recording for the BBC. McGinley's rural childhood and her urban life in the "threadbare"1930s and '40s made New York City's suburbs in the 1950s look like paradise. To Sylvia's generation the same suburbs looked and felt like hell.
Maybe that's why Sylvia thought McGinley had "sold herself." But the author of the one McGinley biography I could find, Linda Wagner-Martin, points out that McGinley's poems complicated the "housewife" ideal. What she wrote was barbed:
[From "Carol with Variations, 1936"]:
Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie;
Your flocks are folded in to sleep, and sleep your little ones.
Behold there is a Star again that climbs the eastern sky,
And seven million living men are picking up their guns.
A review from 1954 of one of McGinley's books opens:
McGinley told Newsweek, "I'm so sick of this 'Phyllis McGinley, suburban housewife and mother of
two' . . . That's only an eighth or a tenth of my work. The rest is different. There's a hell of a lot of straight social criticism." [4]
When the nation's most influential newsweekly, readership then peaking at about 17 million, featured McGinley on its cover [5], the news angle was that McGinley was countering author Betty Friedan's very scary call for liberating legions of unhappy housewives. McGinley could be relied on to defend motherhood and housewifery as noble and fulfilling occupations.
She didn't win this round and in the 1960s retreated into writing about the lives of saints. Less than a year after that cover story, on June 10, 1966, Time's book section published a hyper-sensational review of the U.S. edition of Ariel, introducing "compulsive writer" and suicidal "literary dragon" Sylvia Plath, who eclipsed McGinley -- and other Plath foremothers and influences -- seemingly forever.
[1] 1954 Columbia University Phi Beta Kappa poem. Read the full "In Praise of Diversity" here.
[2] "The Telltale Hearth," Time Magazine, 18 June 1965.
[3] "A Day at the White House," New York Review of Books, 15 July 1965.
[4] https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/mcginley_phyllis/
[5] Time then had a substantial and regular Books section, publishing reviews and profiles of authors, often poets.
N.B. Sylvia might have borrowed the McGinley poem title "Six Nuns in Snow" for her first drafts of "Nuns in Snow," retitled "Sheep in Fog."