Rod McKuen - Criticism

Criticism

Despite his popular appeal, McKuen's work has never been taken seriously by critics and academics or by much of the public. Michael Baers observed in Gale Research's St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture that "through the years his books have drawn uniformly unkind reviews. In fact, criticism of his poetry is uniformly vituperative..."

Frank W. Hoffmann, in Arts and Entertainment Fads, described McKuen's poetry as "tailor-made for the 1960s poetry with a verse that drawled in country cadences from one shapeless line to the next, carrying the rusticated innocence of a Carl Sandburg thickened by the treacle of a man who preferred to prettify the world before he described it."

Philosopher and social critic Robert C. Solomon described McKuen's poetry as "sweet kitsch", and at the height of his popularity in 1969, Newsweek magazine called him "the King of Kitsch".

Writer and literary critic Nora Ephron said, "...for the most part, McKuen's poems are superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly". Pulitzer Prize-winning US Poet Laureate Karl Shapiro said, "It is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet."

In a Chicago Tribune interview with McKuen in 2001 as he was "testing the waters" for a comeback tour, Pulitzer Prize-winning culture critic Julia Keller called his work "so schmaltzy and smarmy that it makes the pronouncements of Kathie Lee Gifford sound like Susan Sontag", "silly and mawkish, the kind of gooey schmaltz that wouldn't pass muster in a freshman creative-writing class The masses ate him up with a spoon, while highbrow literary critics roasted him on a spit." She noted that the third concert on his tour had already been canceled because of sluggish ticket sales.