Rod McKuen, Prolific Poet and Lyricist, Dies at 81

Rod McKuen, a ubiquitous poet, lyricist and songwriter whose work met with immense commercial success if little critical esteem, died on Thursday in Beverly Hills, Calif. He was 81.

Mr. McKuen, who died at a rehabilitation center, had been ill with pneumonia, his half brother, Edward McKuen Habib, told The Associated Press. Information on other survivors was not available.

Mr. McKuen, whom The St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture described as having been, at his height, “the unofficial poet laureate of America,” was the author of dozens of books of poetry, which together sold millions of copies.

For a generation of Americans at midcentury and afterward, Mr. McKuen’s poetry formed an enduring, solidly constructed bridge between the Beat generation and New Age sensibilities. Ranging over themes of love and loss, the natural world and spirituality, his work was prized by readers for its gentle accessibility while being condemned by many critics as facile, tepid and aphoristic.

If critical acceptance eluded Mr. McKuen, by his lights it did not matter. He lived for many years in Beverly Hills, in what The Chicago Tribune described as an “eight-bedroom, 15,000-square-foot mansion filled with more than 100,000 CDs and half a million records.”

It was his robust commercial success that had soured the critics, he said.

“I only know this,” Mr. McKuen told The Chronicle in 2002. “Before the books were successful, whether it was Newsweek or Time or The Saturday Evening Post, the reviews were always raves.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 30, 2015, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Rod McKuen, Prolific Poet and Lyricist, Dies at 81. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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