Auden dropped that stanza from later versions of the poem, but global culture has never dropped Kipling.ĭisney’s Jungle Book remake comes out next year, and “If-” still tops those polls in Britain.
Yeats, Auden judged that time had “Pardoned Kipling” by separating his writing talent from his bigotry. For decades, Orwell wrote, “every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.” In his 1939 elegy for W.B. Read “If-” beside Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” and the line “Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it” starts to smell like colonialist arrogance-or “jingoistic nonsense,” as one British paper put it in 1995, after Britain had voted “If-” its all-time favorite poem.Īnd therein lies the reason for issuing disclaimers at all: Kipling has lasted. Even in his least controversial work, the outlook Orwell called “morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting” bleeds in at the margins.
George Orwell’s 1942 disclaimer has been widely quoted: “It is no use pretending that Kipling’s view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person.” Imperialist racist, aggressive militarist: Kipling was this and more, and very publicly. Meanwhile, Kipling himself remains an icon of obnoxious wrongness.
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,Īnd yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,īut make allowance for their doubting too If you can keep your head when all about you Terse, mysterious, hesitant, it could have introduced a Williams fragment full of precarious gaps and leaps, or an Auden riff on the As You Like It line about evasive speech: “Much virtue in If.” Instead the title belongs to Rudyard Kipling, to the year 1910, and to a didactic poem that remains a classic of righteous certitude. You have probably identified yourself with one or some of its verses at some stage in your career.It’s easy to imagine “ If-” as a great modernist title. It is fresh, positive, forward looking and humane. I have heard it at numerous toasts and speeches made by managers. I am sure you are familiar with Kipling’s “If”, originally written for his son, as it has been one of the most recited and quoted poems in recent times.
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