User:GMcG43/Wendy Cope

Progression of Style
Wendy Cope’s style progression spans nearly fifty years with her intermittent poetry collections. While she has released over two dozen publications, her most well-known books are her adult poetry collections. Omitting limited and selected editions, Cope has five adult releases: Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992), If I Don’t Know (2001), Family Values (2011), and her most recent, Anecdotal Evidence (2018). The changes in her both her writing style and life can be tracked in these five collections.

Cope acknowledges herself that her first two releases are quite different from the later ones. Reportedly, her happiness plays a major part in her writing, and her first two collections were written when she was fairly unhappy. In both collections, the poems vary in content, but are similar in structure. Generally, each poem features a lighthearted delightful tone packed with punchy jokes and a dry compressed wit. The punchline is often “centered on men from the point of view of the single heterosexual woman”. Paired with an unencumbered admiration for life and the simple things in it, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and Serious Concerns drove Cope to instant popularity. Cope’s style and humor became so consistent that both fans and critics alike began to label the pieces written in this style as “Wendy Cope poems” - anthems for “several generations of frustrated and conflicted women”. Details like neat rhyme schemes, humorous observations, and unexpected politically-charged strikes at concepts like marriage or the patriarchy, all became admired aspects of Cope’s first two collections, and garnered her both fame and an audience who became hungry for more.

The following three publications are notably different, darker, and less popular, and it’s no secret why. After the wild success of Serious Concerns in the 1990s, Cope’s life changed entirely. With the money and resources to dedicate herself to her writing, she quit teaching and began living with Lachlan Mackinnon, a poet she later married in 2013. As her overall happiness increase, her poetry noticeably changed. Darker, intricate free verse poems overtook the uncomplicated amusing rhymes of the past. Cope began to allude to her battles with depression, a theme present in all of her work, but that grew more evident with each collection. While there had been insertions of the topic in her earlier collections, critics and fans generally ignored them in favor of her more cheery poems”. The past two decades have led to a sense of contentment, along with a confrontation with depression, to take the main stage in If I Don’t Know, Family Values, and Anecdotal Evidence. Freedom and leisure that comes with success has, no doubt, allowed Cope to focus on deeper, more conflicted issues rather than pumping out guaranteed crowd-pleasers.

In terms of popularity, it is clear what fans prefer. Serious Concerns stands as Cope’s most popular book, even thirty years later. In a top-ten list of “must read” Cope poems, every one of the top five are from either Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis or Serious Concerns. There’s no doubt that these poems are what resonates with readers. However, Cope herself disagrees with the concept of a “Wendy Cope anthem”, and doesn't believe her poetry could be categorized in this way. Cope’s progression and growth, along with her willingness to discuss difficult subjects in her writing, is distinct and unquestionably commendable. Some fans are displeased with the changes and prefer that initial lighthearted approach, but one of the best comic poets from the past fifty years has every authority to develop her style and not to be confined by expectations created by her accomplishments”.

According to multiple sources, Cope’s favorite publication is Anecdotal Evidence and one of her favorite poems is Flowers from Serious Concerns, which is also one of her most famous.