'The Nation Rejoices or Mourns': Literary and Cultural Ambivalences in Wendy Cope's Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986). (19th August 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Waterman, Rory
• Is Part Of: English. Volume 68:Number 263(2019)
• Page Start: 325
• Page End: 343
• Publication Date: 2019-08-19
• Subjects: English language -- Periodicals; English literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 820.9
• DOI: 10.1093/english/efz016
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0013-8215

Abstract

Abstract: The poet Wendy Cope gained a huge reputation in the early 1980s mainly for a series of witty and incisive parodies, often under the name of her desperate fictional poète maudit Jake Strugnell, and these poems were collected, along with others, in her hugely successful and influential debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, which appeared in 1986. This book sold almost 200, 000 copies, but has been the subject of a very small body of criticism. Many of her contemporary poet-critics were dismissive: in one contemporary review, Peter Riley epitomized a not uncommon reaction when he claimed that no 'poetic import can be claimed for the book', and railed against 'a new audience for poetry, one which must be presumed to have previously fought shy of it as too difficult or too deep'. Certainly, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis is not a work of avant garde complexity, but Cope's debut is not as cosily complacent as such critics indicate. It is in fact highly allusive and resistant to orthodoxies – and was a thorn in the side of the literary and cultural establishment into which she was instantly propelled. This essay assesses the ways in which Cope's debut collection takes an ambivalent, nuanced, and parodic response to British institutions, and to the orthodoxies of the male-dominated literary world she was entering.