It is hard for us to understand today how big McGinley was in her time--exponentially bigger than Wendy Cope in the UK, which sadly is the only reference point we have. Auden wrote an introduction to one of her books, and she was almost as much of a household name as Ogden Nash and Robert Frost.
She is now largely forgotten, and while it is true that her best work has not held up as well as Dorothy Parker's best work, her fate is unfair, and the fate of light verse generally even more unfair.
Somewhere there is a nifty article to be written on how and why light verse fell out of favor and what might happen to bring it back. The key, I think, is general circulation journals and newspapers, but it is a hard sell--I know I've tried to persuade a few editors to give poetry a chance, and it hasn't worked. I even tried once to get a little campaign going to persuade Harvard magazine not to drop poetry (it published some of the early work of Philip Larkin and Donald Hall), but alas that failed as well.
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