The fame of American Catholic poet Phyllis McGinley — a traditionalist homebody among avant-garde contemporaries — has faded under criticism from modernists. Yet McGinley, of Irish descent, cared little for her reputation after a lifetime balancing financial need with Catholic conviction.
Unlike many witty, though bitter, writers of buoyant verse, she was essentially an optimist on account of her religious convictions. She assured Time magazine in 1954 that the 20th century would provide a bumper crop of saints: “Saints always crop up in times of trouble and crisis and heresy, and this is a period of the greatest heresy the world has ever known.”
