RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936) – TO BE NUMBERED WITHIN MY SPECIAL MENTIONS AS I RESHUFFLE THEM!

 

“Do you like Kipling?”

“I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled!”

 

Apparently, the postcard with that caption by Donald McGill, English creator of notorious “saucy” cartoon postcards in Britain, holds the record for selling the most copies at over 6 million.

However, that question is more controversial these days, given that Kipling was the quintessential poet of the British Empire, the Victorian Virgil as it were – and when it comes to his poetry, it is difficult for modern readers to overlook his notorious poem “The White Man’s Burden” cheerleading imperialism, as it was even for some of his contemporaries such as Mark Twain.

Still, he did win the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature and was considered for British Poet Laureate, reflecting his undoubted literary skill as well as “a versatile and luminous narrative gift”. He is best known for his fiction, particularly his children’s fantasy in The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book, but also novels such as Kim and short stories such as The Man Who Would Be King.

Whatever the politics of his poetry – and I tend to think this is far more nuanced than the typical controversy or criticism about it as imperial propaganda – it shows an undeniable craft or skill in verse as well as the patterns of sound and speech, particularly of soldiers. I think of Kipling not simply as writing war poetry but military poetry – poetry that distinctively captured the cadence and speech of the British soldiers that were his recurring subject.

T.S. Eliot wrote of Kipling verse that “of a number of poets who have written great poetry, only… a very few whom I should call great verse writers. And unless I am mistaken, Kipling’s position in this class is not only high, but unique.” Similarly, poet Alison Brackenbury wrote “Kipling is poetry’s Dickens, an outsider and journalist with an unrivalled ear for sound and speech.”

And in 2025, I was once again prompted to an appreciation of the quality of Kipling’s verse as the film 28 Years Later made highly effective use of a recital of his poem Boots, evoking the repetitive thought pattern of a soldier marching in war to which it added a note of terrifying urgency, both in the film’s trailers and the film itself.

 

“If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too”

 

However, the Kipling poem that stays in my mind most, as it does for many other people, is his poem If – something of a sermon on Victorian masculine virtues. And while those virtues seem somewhat faded these days to the point of parody – as in that Simpsons episode where Homer retorts to Grandpa Simpson quoting the poem “You’ll be a bonehead!” – I’ll be damned if hearing or reading it doesn’t make one strive to be just a little bit better as a person.

 

“If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

⁠And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

 

RATING:

B-TIER (HIGH TIER)