Though she was also a prolific essayist and writer of children's books, Phyllis McGinley is known chiefly for her light verse. From 1934 to 1958 she published eight collections of her poems, and in 1960 she gathered many of them in Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades, with Seventy New Poems, a book that earned her a Pulitzer Prize in 1961. The recipient of various other honors (including election in 1955 to the National Institute of Arts and Letters), McGinley enjoyed a wide readership in her lifetime, publishing her work in newspapers and women's magazines as well as in literary periodicals, including the New Yorker, the Saturday Review and the Atlantic. 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. As a commentator on the passing social scene and...