Word: kiplingisms
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Ever since he started to publish rhymes (circa 1885), Rudyard Kipling has been one of the world's most read and most neglected poets. Americans and Britons who would not be found dead with a book of poems in their pockets read Kipling-worse, they memorized whole stanzas. A...
But the intellectuals demurred. The literary intellectuals said Kipling did not write poetry but a slick doggerel-a plausible argument. The political intellectuals said Kipling was an apologist for imperialism-a practically unanswerable argument.
Both these arguments are answered by No. 1U.S. Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot (The Waste Land) in the brilliant critical introductory essay to his Choice of Kipling's Verse.
This book is not only an unusual act of literary fraternity, it is a literary event. For Eliot's authority as a critic is great, and by using it in Kipling's behalf, he has done much to restore Kipling to his place as an important English poet...
Ballad Maker. Critic Eliot suggests that, before judging Kipling, it is well to make sure that you know what he was trying to do. "Kipling," Eliot believes, "was not trying to write poetry at all." He was a writer of verse which often, but always incidentally, came to life as...