LARB Reads Wendy Cope's Anecdotal Evidence

A.M. Juster traces poet Wendy Cope's publication history while reviewing the poet's latest collection, Anecdotal Evidence, at Los Angeles Review of Books. Juster explains that Cope's celebrity often takes American readers by surprise. Cope's journey is one that has been rife with hurdles, "Despite her obvious talent and Oxford education," Juster remarks. From there: 

She was a woman in a literary world dominated by males. She worked as an elementary school teacher, not as a professor or editor. She wrote primarily formal poetry at the highpoint of its disfavor within the academy. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to her literary acceptance was that her poems were humorous at a time when the establishment assumed that light verse had altogether died.

Opinion leaders may have given Cope short shrift, but Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis stunned them by selling almost 200,000 copies, an extraordinary number for a British poetry book. Nonetheless, critics only rarely credited Cope for anything other than simply being funny; they passed over her range of styles and subjects, her ideas, her concision, her erudition, her unpredictability, and her mastery of form.

In that book’s first poem, “Engineer’s Corner,” she has 16 lines of fun with an ad by the Engineering Council that pronounces, “In Britain we’ve always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint.” She concludes with this quatrain:

No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
There’s far too much encouragement for poets —
That’s why this country’s going down the drain.

One could careen into these lines and keep laughing about the comparative values of engineers and poets without ever noticing the poem’s subtle shifts in tone and meaning. 

Learn more at Los Angeles Review of Books.