Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades was published by Viking Press in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1961 — the only time the prize has been awarded to a writer working primarily in light verse. The collection draws from McGinley’s three previous volumes and adds new work, presenting her complete range: from the early satirical poems of the 1930s through the suburban domestic verse that made her famous in the 1940s and 1950s.
McGinley’s achievement — unrecognized by the literary establishment during the confessional-poetry era that followed — was to apply genuine technical skill (she was a master of meter, rhyme, and concision) to the subjects that occupied most women’s actual lives: children, marriage, housework, neighbors, school, shopping, the small pleasures and irritations of middle-class domesticity. She did this without condescension (she genuinely valued domestic life) and without sentimentality (she saw its absurdities clearly).
The poems operate through precision and surprise: a five-line poem about PTA meetings captures the sociology of suburban motherhood more accurately than any novel; a sonnet about a child’s first day of school renders the mixture of relief and loss with Shakespearean concision. McGinley’s wit — dry, affectionate, occasionally devastating — places her in the tradition of Dorothy Parker, but where Parker’s comedy was urban and destructive, McGinley’s is suburban and constructive: she mocks what she loves, and loves what she mocks.
W.H. Auden wrote the introduction to Times Three, calling McGinley “one of the few poets who can be read with enjoyment by the educated without their feeling guilty.” The qualification (“educated”) is important: McGinley’s verse is technically accomplished — the meters never falter, the rhymes are never forced, the structures are always appropriate to their content.
Collecting Times Three
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1960): Cloth binding, dust jacket. With foreword by W.H. Auden.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $5–$12
The Pulitzer Prize winner and the definitive McGinley collection. Values are moderate — light verse is undervalued in the collector market — but rising as feminist literary history recovers her reputation.