Rudyard Kipling

His name Rudyard, it is said, was given him because it was by Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire that his father and mother became engaged.

 

The father, Lockwood Kipling, was in the Indian Civil Service, the mother was one of the daughters of a Wesleyan minister, Rev C. B. Macdonald, all famed for their beauty.

Besides Mrs Kipling three of the other sisters married into national biography. Their husbands were Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Poynter, and Alfred Baldwin, a Worcestershire ironmaster, whose son Stanley became Prime Minister. The boy Rudyard was educated at the United Services College at Westward Ho, which he made the scene of his schoolboy story Stalky and Co., and brought himself in under the nickname of The Beetle.

When he was 17 Kipling went out to Lahore, where his father was in charge of the museum. There he joined the staff of the Civil and Military Gazette, and by the time he was 21 had published in it, and collected into a volume verses, chiefly satirical, which he called Departmental Ditties, and short stories called Plain Tales from the Hills.

 

In the next two years he wrote half a dozen more short stories, travelled widely, and arrived back in England by way of America to find himself talked of as a writer from whom his admirers had great expectations.

Further stories and his Barrack Room Ballads heightened those expectations. Though his first long story was somewhat disappointing, he afterwards, in Kim, wrote a tale with Indian surroundings that have a lasting charm. Many more short stories and a succession of volumes of verse have given him an entirely distinctive place in English literature as a poet and writer of short stories, and his Jungle Books, Just-So Stories, and Puck of Pook's Hill stand alone as books for children of varied ages.

Kipling as a poet has been the subject of much controversy, partly because he was regarded by some as politically minded, and partly because he "saw nought common on the earth," and derided the dignity of verse. But, judged by his best, he will remain a poet who enlarged the bounds of English verse, both in imaginative conceptions and in poetic forms.

 

He is the poet who has been most deeply thrilled by the influence of the British race over all the world. To many people it would seem that his one great poem is Recessional, the classic warning against Jingoism and imperialism; to others it will seem that he has never surpassed his poetry of the Sussex he loves.

 

Certainly no poet has excelled him in finding true poetry in men and things which many would scorn as common-Tommy Atkins, the rough deck-hand drunk ashore and a hero at sea, the tinkle of the banjo where no other music can be heard, the bridge which no torrent can destroy, engines on land and sea, the personality of ships, "the little cargo boats that fill with every tide," the deep-sea cables: he sees the soul of things in action and finds in them romance.

The lilt of his lines always fits the message they carry. No poet is more open to criticism, for a good deal of his early writing is merely typical of Victorian barrack-room life, and in prose and verse he has not been sure in his selection of what is worth while.

But the main fact in estimating his work, in verse or in prose, is that unmistakable visitations of a genius, strongly individual and entirely original, are felt in them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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