Wendy Cope's style progression spans nearly fifty years. While she has released over two dozen publications, her most well-known works are her five intermittent poetry collections: Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), Serious Concerns (1992), If I Don’t Know (2001), Family Values (2011), and Anecdotal Evidence (2018). The changes in her both her writing style and life can be tracked in these five collections.
Cope acknowledges that the first two are quite different from the latter three. She claims this is due to the major role played by her happiness in her writing, and that her first two collections were written when she was fairly unhappy. Both collections' poems vary in content, but are similar in structure. Generally, each poem features a lighthearted tone with punchline jokes and a dry, compressed wit. The punchline is often "centered on men from the point of view of the single heterosexual woman".[16] Paired with an admiration for life and the mundane, the collections garnered Cope popularity. Cope's style and humor became so consistent that both fans and critics alike began to label pieces written in this style as "Wendy Cope poems" - anthems for "several generations of frustrated and conflicted women".[17] This style was admired for neat rhyme schemes, humorous observations, and unexpected politically charged strikes at concepts like marriage or the patriarchy.
The following three publications are notably darker. They have also been less popular. The wild success of Serious Concerns in the 1990s changed Cope's life entirely. Newfound money and resources allowed her to quit teaching, dedicate herself to writing, and begin living with Mackinnon, whom she later married in 2013. As her happiness increased, her poetry changed. Free verse poems with darker tones replaced light-hearted rhyme. Cope's allusions to her battles with depression, a theme present in all of her work, grew more frequent.[17] The freedom of success allowed Cope to focus on more thorny issues.
Serious Concerns stands as Cope's most popular book, even thirty years later. One top-ten list of 'must read' Cope poems has all top five poems as coming from her first two collections.[18] However, Cope herself disagrees with the concept of a "Wendy Cope anthem".[17] Cope's favourite of her own works is Anecdotal Evidence. Her favourite of her own poems is 'Flowers' from Serious Concerns.
Her domestic love poem 'The Orange' became increasingly viral from 2018, leading to Faber & Faber releasing a line of accompanying merchandise for it, and publishing a new edition of her works in 2023, entitled The Orange and other poems.
