"The Easiest to Love"

Comely, amber-eyed Phyllis McGinley is a suburban housewife and mother whose lively curiosity and needle-pointed mind produce some of the most wryly pleasant light verse now being written. New Yorker readers have delighted for 20 years in the stings of her short barbs, sharpened on the complexities of modern living. She has published six books of poetry (the last, in 1951, an unabashed panegyric to suburbia called A Short Walk From the Station) and eight books for children.

She has written the lyrics for a Broadway revue, Small Wonder, and the continuity for a classic movie, The Emperor's Nightingale. She has been a copywriter for an advertising agency and an editor of Town and Country.

A full-time wife (of a New York Telephone Co. executive) who has raised two teen-age daughters, Phyllis McGinley was born 49 years ago in Ontario, Ore., grew up in those parts of the West where there were "bucking bronco contests every Sunday instead of baseball," came East fresh out of college (University of Utah, University of California), after selling a few poems to New York magazines.

A few years ago, Poet McGinley began to dip into history ("I have a theory," she says, "that people cannot appreciate history until they reach 40"). As she read, she encountered saints and their works. Though raised a Roman Catholic, she knew little about them and began to read more and more until, she says, "like everyone else who reads about the saints, I fell madly in love with them." The result of Phyllis McGinley's love affair was a series of deft verses on some of the saints (see opposite page}, which she titled "Saints Without Tears" and assembled as a section in her forthcoming book, The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley (Viking). Poet McGinley is happily boning up on more of the saints, hopes eventually to produce a full book of poems about them.

"Everyone loves a hero, and the saints are the best heroes of all," she explains.

"They are geniuses . . . they have enormous charm and complete selflessness. So they are the easiest to love. I think there will be a great many of them in this century. 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."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.