Kipling, is he over-rated?

DrFidelius · March 22, 2016, 12:00pm

I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I have If. . . and Recessional hanging on the wall of my workspace.

salinqmind · March 22, 2016, 1:57pm

Is Kipling over-rate? As compared to whom? He’s one of my favorite authors, ever. I don’t care that he’s racist, he was a man of his time. I love The Jungle Book and his poems. (I just saw the Jungle Book movie with Sabu on tv, also the Disney version. And there is a new version coming out soon. Can’t wait!) Some very good movies have been made from his works.

The_Stainless_Steel_Rat · March 22, 2016, 2:30pm

Indeed. For the period he wrote in (and about), he is the perfect writer to read about the attitudes and conduct of the British Empire at the height of it’s power. His protraits of the British colonial forces (Danny Deever, Tommy) weren’t always flattering, but they could be gritty.

And like several who have posted above, “My Boy Jack” should be required reading for all the US Presidential candidates, IMHO.

As for me, my own favorite was Mine Sweepers:

Dawn off the Foreland – the young flood making
Jumbled and short and steep –
Black in the hollows and bright where it’s breaking –
Awkward water to sweep.
“Mines reported in the fairway,
Warn all traffic and detain.
Sent up Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain.”

Noon off the Foreland – the first ebb making
Lumpy and strong in the bight.
Boom after boom, and the golf-hut shaking
And the jackdaws wild with fright.
“Mines located in the fairway,
Boats now working up the chain,
Sweepers – Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain.”

Dusk off the Foreland – the last light going
And the traffic crowding through,
And five damned trawlers with their syreens blowing
Heading the whole review!
“Sweep completed in the fairway,
No more mines remain.
Sent back Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain.”

PatrickLondon · March 22, 2016, 2:40pm

If your criteria for rating someone highly include the idea that they have to write about the present day and not present you with information you have to look up, then indeed it may be hard to understand why Kipling was rated highly in his time. But it is a rather limiting and impoverishing view of what literature has to offer.

In his time, he was initially viewed with great suspicion by most of the British upper crust in India because, in Plain Tales from the Raj, he wrote with a more than jaundiced and satirical eye about them and with more interest and enthusiasm about the Indians than the stuffier empire-wallahs approved of. As noted above, he was also unusual in pointing out the cost of gung-ho jingoism to the ordinary soldiers and their families long before his remorse at the loss of his son (see his poem My Boy Jack, which was written well before he lost his own boy Jack). It took a long time for him to be seen as the cheerleader for Empire, King and Country, and even then it wasn’t as mindlessly table-thumping as you might imagine.

Yes, his style in writing for children, as in the Just So stories (that I was brought up on) is, by today’s standards, over-arch as was not uncommon in Edwardian times, and his writing about non-European cultures and people, and about the ordinary soldiers, can, for today’s tastes, seem patronising and too rigidly bound by the racial categories of his time.

I don’t know enough about all the rest of his work to know if it justifies the Nobel Prize, but he is an important figure in gaining an understanding of many British, or should I say, English attitudes of the time. There’s a reason why so many of his works still resonate with people today, and why, for example, “If” is still rated one of the most popular poems in English.

aldiboronti · March 22, 2016, 6:05pm

Kipling has never been regarded as a major prose writer or major poet. He’s definitely B list. I like some of his stuff but in the main I’d go along with the verses by his contemporary JK Stephen disparaging the writing of the time:

BTW Stephen was decidedly upper-crust so this ties in with the previous poster’s remarks about how Kipling was initially regarded by the Establishment.

Malthus · March 22, 2016, 6:23pm

Interesting mention of Haggard in that poem - he’s another immensely popular author of his day, who is less read these days. Personally, I love his stuff, though he did write a ton of it, much of which copies itself.

Interestingly, his most popular work, King Solomon’s Mines, is very explicitly anti-racist and anti-colonial in tone - astonishingly so, for the era it was written in. So much so, that throughout the 20th century it tended to be re-written with a bit of a “racial makeover” for its movie versions - the love interest, for example, often made into a White woman, from a Black woman in the original.

BrainGlutton · March 22, 2016, 7:11pm

I know a lot of Kipling poems by heart just because filker Leslie Fish has set them to music. (And her politics are nothing like his, either, she’s a Wobbly anarchist who carries an actual IWW union card.) Fans like 'em.

Peter_Morris · March 22, 2016, 7:12pm

In that poem, who are the Ass and the blundering boy?

BrainGlutton · March 22, 2016, 7:14pm

And it might as well be “We Shall Overcome” compared to a less-known Kipling poem, “A Song of the White Men.” “This is the song that the white men sing / When they go to clean a land” came often to my mind in the runup to the Iraq invasion.

XT · March 22, 2016, 7:16pm

Trinopus:

He’s brilliant! Short stories like “The Eye of Allah” or “The Church That Was At Antioch” show a depth of insight and compassion.

Yes, his poetry is forced, heavy on meter and rhyme – but he intended a kind of “ballad” tone. He’s in the same category as, say, A.B. Banjo Paterson (if you haven’t read “The Man From Snowy River,” you ought to! The movie was good, too!)

Kipling, like G.K. Chesterton, was a product of his time, and there are some flaws we can identify in hindsight. Both are still great writers; we just have to read them with modern reservations.

To answer the question in the OP, actually, at this point in time, Kipling is under-rated. There was a heavy kick against him in the latter half of the twentieth century, during the devolution of the British Empire and the erosion of the Commonwealth. He was persona non grata on many college campuses, both in the English-speaking countries and in countries formerly part of the Empire.

Kipling is neglected, today, but retains the greatness of, say, Robert Louis Stevenson or Arthur Conan Doyle: a writer of great contemporary popularity, who’s still pretty hot beans even today.

Yeah, I agree with this. Mainly where I see Kipling fans is in the military, or people with a military background…you often get Kipling quotes tossed in as an almost inside joke in those circles. The general population, though, hardly know who he is, if they know at all and probably couldn’t name anything he’s done if you put a gun to their heads. He’s very under-rated, IMHO.

BrainGlutton · March 22, 2016, 7:24pm

George Orwell addresses (an earlier iteration of) that phenomenon in great depth in this classic 1942 essay, which is well worth a read.

Assessing Kipling strictly as an artist and strictly as a poet (the quality of his prose fiction is not discussed), he says:

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling’s metrical work as ‘verse’ and not ‘poetry’, but adds that it is ‘GREAT verse’, and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a ‘great verse-writer’ if there is some of his work ‘of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry’. Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling’s work seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say,
‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’

and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘Felix Randal’ or ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the words ‘verse’ and ‘poetry’, if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we live in.

<snip>

In so far as a writer of verse can be popular, Kipling has been and probably still is popular. In his own lifetime some of his poems travelled far beyond the bounds of the reading public, beyond the world of school prize-days, Boy Scout sing-songs, limp-leather editions, poker-work and calendars, and out into the yet vaster world of the music halls. Nevertheless, Mr. Eliot thinks it worth while to edit him, thus confessing to a taste which others share but are not always honest enough to mention. The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form–for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things–some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. The merit of a poem like ‘When all the world is young, lad’ is that, however sentimental it may be, its sentiment is ‘true’ sentiment in the sense that you are bound to find yourself thinking the thought it expresses sooner or later; and then, if you happen to know the poem, it will come back into your mind and seem better than it did before. Such poems are a kind of rhyming proverb, and it is a fact that definitely popular poetry is usually gnomic or sententious. One example from Kipling will do:

White hands cling to the bridle rein,
Slipping the spur from the booted heel;
Tenderest voices cry ‘Turn again!’
Red lips tarnish the scabbarded steel:
Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There is a vulgar thought vigorously expressed. It may not be true, but at any rate it is a thought that everyone thinks. Sooner or later you will have occasion to feel that he travels the fastest who travels alone, and there the thought is, ready made and, as it were, waiting for you. So the chances are that, having once heard this line, you will remember it.

FasterThanMeerkats · March 22, 2016, 9:38pm

And there’s also “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!”

Teuton · March 22, 2016, 9:44pm

He does make exceedingly good cakes.

Ukulele_Ike · March 23, 2016, 1:29am

King Solomon’s Mines is the most popular in that it’s probably the one some people still know about these days. But back in Haggard’s time, She was the Big One.

Only the serious wonks still read it today (blush) and it’s remembered primarily for the descriptive “She Who Must Be Obeyed.” But now that Rumpole at the Bailey is fading into the past, that’s being forgotten too.

I just asked the Ukulele Lady if she knew the phrase and she said “Yeah, I’ve heard it, but I just thought it was something all men said about their wives.”

Mahaloth · March 23, 2016, 1:33am

I was referencing Clue. I had not heard of Kipling cakes.

MacSpon · March 23, 2016, 2:02am

Kipling has both made me cry, and made me cry with laughter. That’s not doing too badly…

I’ve read it many times, but parts of “Stalky & Co” still make me laugh uncontrollably; and the short story “The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat” even more so.

While the poem “Jobson’s Amen” (which might be considered Kipling’s answer to his own jingoism) still brings a lump to my throat…

Hector_St_Clare · March 23, 2016, 2:12am

I’ve actually read the sequel to She, though not She itself. Spoiler: it is to She what the new Star Wars movie is to the original 1977 Star Wars. It was still pretty good though in spite of being shamelessly self-derivative: Haggard was a really good writer. There are still scenes from <I>King Solomon’s Mines</I> that I remember really vividly (laying the dead African guy next to the 300-year old Portuguese corpse in the snow cave, the scene with the cave full of stalactites, the final duel at the end of the war) in spite of not having read it for years.

Some of Kipling’s ‘horror’ stories are good. The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes and Mark of the Beast are seriously creepy in a good way.

Ukulele_Ike · March 23, 2016, 2:47am

I have a hardcover annotated version of She, published by a university press in 1991. I think you can get a Kindle edition for about a buck. A very good way to read it, because Haggard squeezed a lot of arcane shit into the novel that would make even the most devoted Victorian of today scratch his head.

She was the adventure novel that launched a thousand ships of adventure novels afterward. Everyone stole from it. It’s must reading, if you like this sort of thing.

Trinopus · March 23, 2016, 3:40am

King Solomon’s Mines…with the fifteen-minute eclipse of the sun that occurs during a full moon… Ah, well: it’s still a good book. (Pretty darn good movie, too!)

Kimstu · March 23, 2016, 3:48am

Don’t miss the Kipling settings on several albums by Peter Bellamy.