Critical Evaluation
The many manuscript drafts of McGinley's writings reveal her method of composition for various works. Perhaps most interesting are her essays, for which she often composed a "serious" version before producing her characteristically humorous final manuscript. Suburbia and sainthood are the prominent topics of McGinley's writing, together with occasional pieces produced for various holidays, especially Christmas.
Besides her popular reputation, she earned the admiration of a number of critics and poets, including W.H. Auden, who praised her imagination and technical skill in his foreword for Times Three. Auden praised her dexterous, unostentatious rhyming and found in her familial sensibility a likeness to Austen and Woolf, yet also a singular, accessible voice.
McGinley has been criticized for providing readers with transient humor but not actually effecting any change. Betty Friedan has said that McGinley was a good craftsman but did nothing to improve or change the lives of housewives. To Friedan, domesticity cripplingly confined women and did not allow them a chance to pursue their own interests or careers. This was a reoccurring opinion amongst many of the second wave feminists who were McGinley’s contemporaries. As a result, her poetry was largely ignored by feminist critics.
In 1964 she was honored with the Laetare Medal by the University of Notre Dame, which describes it as "An honor to a man or woman who has 'enriched the heritage of humanity.'"
Another criticism was McGinley’s use of light verse poetry. Sylvia Plath wrote in her journal, “Phyllis McGinley is out – light verse: she’s sold herself” (Leroy 14-15). Her use of light verse in the midst of the rise of modern avant-garde and confessional poetry made McGinley’s poetry seem dated in form, as well as in ideology.
Phyllis McGinley was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in 1961 for her book “Times Three”. She was the first to be awarded the poetry prize for a collection of light verse.
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