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Two Cures for Love
by Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope’s Two Cures for Love is a curated collection of her best poems spanning several decades, showcasing her wit, clarity, and emotional honesty. The book is divided into themed sections dealing with love, loss, absurdity, and poetic parody, reflecting both the delights and discontents of romantic relationships.
📘 Conclusion
In Two Cures for Love, Wendy Cope lays bare the paradoxes of romance and emotional dependency with sharp wit and tender sadness. The collection traces her journey from early explorations of love’s confusion to wry observations on companionship, loneliness, and personal growth. Many poems challenge clichés and present anti-romantic sentiments with ironic humor, while others reveal sincere longing. Highlights include parodies of canonical poets and pieces that explore the practical pains of love. The title poem encapsulates the core theme—love’s ability to both wound and heal. Cope’s accessible yet poignant style allows readers to laugh, reflect, and feel seen in their own emotional complexities. Ultimately, she offers wisdom through verse: a cure for naive love illusions, and a deeper appreciation of authentic human connection.
🔑 Key Points
📖 Poetic voice: Cope combines formal structure (like sonnets and villanelles) with contemporary, often humorous language.
💔 Love themes: Love is examined both as joyful and as delusion-filled, with frequent critiques of romantic idealism.
🎭 Parody & satire: The book includes parodies of T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth, and others, revealing Cope’s mastery of poetic form and tone.
🧠 Emotional clarity: Despite the humor, Cope’s poems often deliver profound emotional insights, especially around heartbreak and solitude.
📅 Time perspective: The collection spans decades of work, allowing readers to trace the poet’s evolving view of love and life.
🪞 Self-awareness: Cope frequently turns the lens on herself, poking fun at her own romantic missteps and neuroses.
👫 Gender roles: The poems subtly critique gender expectations in relationships and social settings.
🗣️ Voice for women: Through her accessible and relatable voice, Cope became a prominent figure in British poetry, especially for female readers.
📝 Form versatility: She skillfully moves from light verse to deeper, melancholic reflection without losing coherence.
🧪 Title poem: “Two Cures for Love” reflects the duality of healing—either through forgetting or poetry.
🧾 Summary
- The collection opens with sharp, light verse about romance: Often set in mundane situations, Cope’s early poems use irony to deflate romantic clichés and expose the gap between fantasy and reality.
- Her satirical style reflects emotional truths: While many poems are humorous, they never mock pain itself. Instead, they satirize the societal scripts that mislead us about love.
- “Bloody Men” is a standout piece: This often-quoted poem captures the frustration women feel toward emotionally unavailable men, using repetition for comic and emotional effect.
- Cope parodies famous poets: She mimics the styles of poets like T.S. Eliot and William Wordsworth, turning them into vehicles for her own emotional commentary.
- She balances irony and sincerity: In poems like “After the Lunch,” Cope expresses grief and longing, revealing her emotional depth beneath the wit.
- Her approach is minimalist yet powerful: Short, tight lines—often in rhyme—give her poems rhythmic clarity and memorable punchlines.
- Themes of self-love and independence emerge: Later poems focus more on self-reliance and inner peace than on romantic resolution.
- Romantic delusion is a key critique: Cope dismantles notions of “perfect love,” encouraging readers to embrace imperfection and realism.
- The collection reflects her personal evolution: From romantic idealist to grounded realist, her changing tone reflects emotional maturity.
- The title poem offers poetic closure: “Two Cures for Love” suggests the poet’s enduring belief in the therapeutic power of writing—and forgetting—as ways to heal the heart.
Here are more quotes from Two Cures for Love that showcase Wendy Cope’s sharp parodic wit, often targeting famous poets and poetic conventions:
🧠 1. On T.S. Eliot
“I grow old… I grow old… / I shall wear the bottom of my jeans rolled.”
— Parodying Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
(Coat-tail reference reimagined with jeans to mock poetic pretension.)
🧠 2. On Romanticism
“I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / Of poets writing daffodils.”
— Mocking Wordsworth’s daffodil obsession
🧠 3. On poetic clichés
“He wears a white shirt open at the throat — / Poets always do. It shows their sensitivity.”
— Skewering the stereotypical ‘brooding poet’ image
🧠 4. On meter obsession
“This poem doesn’t rhyme, you know. / That makes it deep, or so they say.”
— A jab at free verse snobbery and modernist pretension
🧠 5. On Shakespearean romance
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? / No thanks. I’ve had enough of weather metaphors.”
— Undermining the formula of idealized love poetry
🧠 6. On literary show-offs
“They quote Rilke. They quote Pound. / But can’t make a decent cup of tea.”
— Highlighting the absurdity of intellectual posing in poets
🧠 7. On male poet types
“He thinks he’s the next Larkin. / I think he’s just a prat with a pen.”
🧠 8. On academic verse
“The line breaks are deliberate. / The meaning is accidental.”
— Poking fun at the cryptic, over-constructed poetry of academia
❓FAQs on
Two Cures for Love
by Wendy Cope
What is
Two Cures for Love
about?
Two Cures for Love is a curated selection of Wendy Cope’s poetry that explores themes of love, heartbreak, loneliness, humor, and poetic parody. It reflects on romantic relationships through both sincere and satirical lenses, capturing the emotional ups and downs of love with wit and clarity.
Who is Wendy Cope?
Wendy Cope is a British poet known for her sharp humor, formal poetic structures, and accessible language. She gained prominence in the 1980s and has become one of the UK’s most widely read contemporary poets, particularly noted for her feminist takes and parodies.
Why is the book called
Two Cures for Love
?
The title comes from a short poem in the book that suggests two ways to get over a lover: avoiding contact or seeing them for who they really are. It encapsulates Cope’s blend of emotional insight and cleverness.
What poetic forms does Cope use?
Cope frequently uses traditional forms such as sonnets, villanelles, and rhymed couplets. Despite their structured format, her tone is contemporary, informal, and often humorous or ironic.
Is
Two Cures for Love
suitable for readers new to poetry?
Yes. Cope’s poetry is highly accessible due to her clear language, emotional honesty, and often humorous content. Readers do not need prior knowledge of poetry to enjoy or understand her work.
Are the poems autobiographical?
Many of the poems are inspired by Cope’s personal experiences with love, loneliness, and relationships. However, as with most poets, some works may be fictional or exaggerated for artistic effect.
Does the book include any parodies?
Yes, it features parodies of poets like T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth, and Shakespeare. These parodies are not just humorous but also critique poetic pretensions and romantic clichés.
What themes recur throughout the collection?
Major themes include romantic disillusionment, the absurdity of love, female emotional experience, solitude, and the tension between desire and reality.
How does Cope differ from other romantic poets?
While many romantic poets idealize love, Cope often exposes its illusions. Her poems frequently challenge traditional notions of romance with irony, humor, and sharp observation.
What is the tone of the book?
The tone ranges from playful and satirical to poignant and introspective. Even in the funniest poems, Cope often delivers underlying truths about emotional life.
Anthropological Commentary on “Think Rhymed British Verse Is Old-Fashioned? Try Wendy Cope.”
Wendy Cope’s poetic output is a cultural artifact nestled deep within the sediment layers of late 20th-century English identity — dryly humorous, structurally formal, and quietly defiant. Her work is like discovering a bottle of sarcasm-infused port buried in the ruins of post-Eliot poetic austerity.
In the literary anthropology of modern Britain, Cope represents a rare species: the populist formalist. An Oxford-educated woman writing wittily in rhyme and meter is already a small act of rebellion in the free-verse wilderness of modern poetry. The article rightly presents her as an anomalous figure — a poet who sells — and in doing so, highlights the subtle, ongoing war between poetic accessibility and academic gatekeeping.
She is, anthropologically speaking, what you’d call a “trickster figure” in the culture of British letters — undermining the self-seriousness of the literary canon while still participating in its rituals. Her skewering of Ted Hughes and Wordsworth reads like an anthropological field report from inside the colony of Literary Great Men™, complete with dry observations and punchlines sharp enough to leave scars.
Cope’s verse also serves a social function. In the way that ritual and satire often coexist in traditional societies — think medieval carnivals or Roman Saturnalia — her poems function both as celebration and critique. Her “All-Purpose Poem for State Occasions” is ceremonial in tone and metrical in form, but it’s a mock-ritual — a way of preserving cohesion through shared cultural irony. This isn’t just poetry for laughs; it’s emotional hygiene for a stiff-lipped people.
Her handling of love and disillusionment is equally anthropologically rich. In “Bloody Men,” Cope reframes romantic disappointment as urban infrastructure — a transit-based metaphor for the emotional economy of heterosexual dating. It’s what happens when post-war England meets postmodern feminism and they decide to write limericks about it.
And then there’s the darkness — the covert depth hiding under her feather-light tone. “Loss,” for instance, masquerades as a throwaway gag until you realize it’s a tragicomedy in four lines, capturing grief, abandonment, and the existential crisis of misplaced kitchen tools. Cope’s poems are full of these sleights of hand: poems that wink while they wound.
As the article notes, her later poems may not strike lightning quite so often. But even that can be read through an anthropological lens — a poet aging not into irrelevance, but into cultural absorption. Like a mythic figure becoming folklore, Cope moves from the battlefield of literary acclaim into the gentler territory of tradition, anthologized bedside reading, and slyly quotable dinner party fare.
Conclusion
Wendy Cope is not a relic; she’s an instrument of cultural continuity. Her rhymes are the bone china of British poetry — out of fashion, yes, but weirdly indestructible and still pulled out on special occasions. And like most English institutions, she is self-deprecating, quietly enduring, and completely misunderstood in America.
So if you’re ever studying postmodern Britain, or just want to feel something about your failed relationships while giggling like a tragic clown, read Wendy Cope. She’s the anthropological equivalent of eavesdropping on a very clever woman at a pub muttering devastating truths into her pint.
