Washington Post obituary, Matt Schudel suggests that McKuen's commercial success engendered a backlash from the literary community. McKuen himself quipped that "The most unforgivable sin in the world is to be a bestselling poet". 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, "[F]or 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. His poetry is not even trash." 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 claimed that "Millions more have loathed him [...] finding his work so schmaltzy and smarmy that it makes the pronouncements of Kathie Lee Gifford sound like Susan Sontag," and that his work "drives many people crazy. They find it silly and mawkish, the kind of gooey schmaltz that wouldn't pass muster in a freshman creative-writing class" while stating that "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. In May 2019, Backbeat Books published A Voice of the Warm: The Life of Rod McKuen by Barry Alfonso. This was the first in-depth biography of McKuen. In his introduction to the book, singer and music historian Michael Feinstein wrote that McKuen's life and work held a significant place in pop culture: "[McKuen] knew how to create something that made a reader or listener say, 'That’s me.' Like Gershwin’s, his work is a document of the time in which it was created. But what he did also transcends that time and still speaks fundamentally to the things that matter to people: romance, relationships, the human condition. Those things don’t change. He used the vernacular of