1 Thomas Pinney, ed. THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF THE POEMS OF RUDYARD KIPLING, 3 vols (Cambridge, 2013), 3 vols, xlviii + 2349 pp. Reviewed by Richard Cronin In 1976 Margaret Thatcher chose for her holiday reading the collected poems of
her favorite poet, Rudyard Kipling. In that hot summer she read through all 845 poems.
Had she lived to consult Thomas Pinney's edition her task would have been a good deal
more demanding, for his three volumes include around 1400 poems. Pinney's is a
prodigious feat of scholarship that no individual could have accomplished alone. He
acknowledges special debts to Andrew Rutherford, whose Early Verse by Rudyard
Kipling (1986) so widely extended the canon; to Barbara Rosenbaum's description of no
less than 2,309 Kipling items in the Index of English Manuscripts; and to David Alan
Richards's recent Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliography (2010). But even after all this is
granted, Pinney's achievement remains remarkable. He has himself discovered some fifty
poems in a variety of places, some of them unexpected: in a New York house undergoing
restoration, in the papers of a former director of the Cunard Line, in the possession of the
daughter of one of Kipling's godchildren. But the labor involved in that detective work
pales in comparison with the task of collation. Kipling published his poetry more widely
and more variously than any other poet before or since. He published on four continents
and in all kinds of outlets, from sophisticated literary magazines to local newspapers in
India, Canada, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere, and many of the poems were
extensively revised for their publication in volume form. Given Kipling's publication
2 habits it is inconceivable that no new poems will be discovered in the future, but it seems
unlikely that new discoveries will change significantly the view of Kipling's achievement
that emerges from Pinney's magisterial volumes.
Much work remains. Many of Kipling's poems are topical and need extensive
annotation if they are to be fully understood. Pinney's notes are helpful, as when he points
out that the early poem "A New Departure" (1883) responds to the Ilbert Bill, which had
authorized native judges to try British citizens (Kipling was not in favour). But the notes
are sporadic and, as Pinney acknowledges, vestigial. He directs the reader to the Kipling
Society website commentary on the poems, whose online format easily allows expansion
and revision, but the commentary is as yet uneven and touches only a small fraction of
the poems. Nevertheless, Pinney has produced for the first time a text and a textual
history of the poems that can claim full authority.
In their scholarship and in their handsome production, these three volumes seem
firmly to establish Kipling's status as a major English poet, and yet in his introduction
Pinney stops short of any such claim. "Kipling as a poet," he writes, "will doubtless
continue to attract admirers and to provoke detractors, and no one can say which of the
two will prevail in determining the public judgment of his achievement" (xlvii). One
might have thought that the matter had long ago been decided. It was not eccentric of
Margaret Thatcher to have fixed on Kipling as her favourite poet. In 1995, after all, a
public vote identified "If" as the nation's favourite poem. But both decisions have been
adduced as evidence that Margaret Thatcher and the British public lack a genuine taste
for poetry at all. "If" is admired by readers who hold that poems ought to give memorable
3 expression to admirable sentiments. "If" is not likely to be a favourite poem of those who
do not accept that poetry is primarily a vehicle for the expression of sentiments, nor of
those who disapprove of the sentiments expressed.
The common objections to Kipling are persuasive. It may be that his popular
appeal depends on his refusal of the formal experiments that characterise the poetry of his
contemporaries. He may belong with poets such as the Canadian Robert Service, or the
Australian Banjo Paterson, differing from them only in that his views have a greater
power to embarrass. For what other English poet does the expression "the white man"
denote not just an ethnic identity but an ethical ideal? But Kipling retains what a poet
such as Service lacks: the capacity to surprise. Who could have predicted, for example,
that it should have been Kipling who in 1919 wrote the fitting epitaph for all those
unfortunate First World War soldiers cruelly executed for cowardice?
I could not look on Death, which being known,
Men led me to him, blindfold and alone. ("The Coward")
Robert Service and Banjo Paterson are national poets who inspire an affection
more or less confined to their countrymen. In this too Kipling might seem their
counterpart. But Thomas Pinney is an American scholar, and the critic who first and still
most influentially put the case for Kipling's major status was also American born. In his
introduction to A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941), T. S. Eliot notes Kipling's "universal
foreignness": his deep affection for India, for the Empire, for England and for Sussex,
Eliot writes, coincides with "a remoteness as of an alarmingly intelligent visitor from
another planet." (Eliot, Introduction, 1963 edn. 23). In the dedicatory poem to The Seven
4 Seas (1896), Kipling describes what it is like to find oneself in a foreign city, the feeling
that besets one of being "[d]azed and newly alone," and many of the poems seem written
out of just such a mood. It may be the foreignness of Pinney and Eliot that alerts them to
the peculiar virtues of Kipling's verse. His imperialist poems celebrate the perspective of
the outsider, of the man who lives and works far from England, and may-- like Kipling
himself -- have been born far from it. This patriotism of the outsider is what makes his
version of imperialism so peculiarly generous. The soldiers and the civil servants who
spend their lives thousands of miles from England know bigger skies and wider horizons
than those who are confined to English shores. The Boer war veteran of "Chant-Pagan"
(1903) finds when he returns to England that "there's somethin' gone small." England
with its " 'ouses both sides of the street" is a sad contrast to the Veldt with its "valleys as
big as a shire," and the obligation to touch his hat when he meets "parson an' gentry"
rankles in a man who has known the rough camaraderie of the campaign. His own
countrymen seem somehow more foreign than the "Dutchman" he was fighting against.
He dreams of going back to South Africa, echoing as he does so an Irishman feeling out
of place in London. "I will arise an' get 'ence,'" he chants, in a cockney parody of the Irish
Republican Yeats's "Lake Isle of Innisfree." Perhaps it is easier for the American than the
English ear to attend to the complexities of feeling in such a poem.
T. S. Eliot is almost as reticent as Pinney in the claims he makes for Kipling. In
the case of Kipling, he suspects, "the critical tools which we are accustomed to use in
analysing and criticising poetry do not seem to work" (17). His poetry does pose special
problems. Pinney has Kipling's authority for publishing independently the poems that
were written to accompany prose stories, but if --as he says-- we cannot "appreciate the
5 whole of a given poem's meaning" except in the context of the story (xlvii), then his
edition refuses access to the full meaning of many of the poems that it reproduces--even
though it presents them more fully and accurately than ever before.
But it seems still more important that so many of Kipling's poems seem written in
a manner that resists analysis. His preferred form, as Eliot notes, is the ballad. A verse
form that has survived for centuries and spread over much of the world is clearly well
suited to a poet so interested in wide expanses of space and time. Kipling's Sussex poems
are archaeological. The sound of his footsteps as he walks the lanes echoes the tramp of
the Roman legions. Poems such as "Chant-Pagan" hanker after space, "the shine an' the
size / Of the 'igh, unexpressible skies." And yet the ballad is of all poetic forms the most
resistant to verbal analysis.
In the whole of his introduction Eliot offers just one comment on Kipling's use of
words. Of a single line from "Danny Deever" (1890), "'What's that that whimpers
over'ead?' said Files-on-Parade," Eliot writes that "the word whimper" seems "exactly
right." (Is it pure coincidence that the world ends with "a whimper" in Eliot's own
"Hollow Men" (1925)?) There are moments as remarkable scattered all the way through
these three volumes: the distress that falls unannounced from "the unhinting sky"
("Dedication" to The Five Nations [1903]), the city traffic "slurring" through the London
mud ("The Broken Men" [1902]), the quick ear that registers "the click of the restless
girders / As the steel contracts in the cold" ("Bridge-Guard in the Karroo" [1901]). But no
one would look to Kipling for the natural magic that Arnold thought so characteristic of
British poetry.
6 His admirers relish the swing of the verse, but his rhythmic effects can be
surprisingly delicate. In "My Boy Jack" (1916), the line that closes the first two stanzas is
tremulous, "Not with this wind blowing and this tide." The third may end with a cadence
too emphatically heroic, "Not even with that wind blowing and that tide," but the
emphasis allows the fourth stanza to close the poem with a cadence adequate to the
nobility of the sacrifice of a young life and to its sadness, "And gave to that wind blowing
and that tide!" Nevertheless Kipling's metrical effects rarely prompt the delighted
astonishment that Hardy elicits in poem after poem. Nor does Kipling offer the privileged
access to an interior life that is often expected of lyric poets. In an early poem included
in Departmental Ditties Kipling complains of the presumption that "The Singer generally
sings / Of personal and private things," and admits that he is powerless to dispel the "pet
delusion" ("La Nuit Blanche" [1887]). But his poems do nothing to support it. He prefers
speaking in voices other than his own, and even the assumed voices tend to be generic
rather than individual. He favours anonymous characters such as the officer of the Indian
Civil Service, Tommy Atkins, or "Sergeant Whatsisname" ("Pharaoh and the Sergeant"
[1897]), so that the music hall seems as much of an influence on his handling of the
dramatic monologue as Browning is.
Pinney is no more willing than Eliot to predict what "the public judgement" of
Kipling's achievement will turn out to be. In 1941 Eliot was a good deal more confident
that Kipling was a great verse-writer than a great poet, and he spends the greater part of
his introduction worrying away at the distinction between the two without ever quite
succeeding in making it clear. Kipling seems just as unsure himself of his poetic status.
His schoolboy poems include many parodies. He mimics Tennyson, Browning, and
7 Morris with reasonable facility, though the parody of Burns is amongst the very worst
ever perpetrated: "Hoots ! toots! ayont, ahint, afore, / The bleth'rin' blast may blathe and
blaw" ("The Indian Farmer at Home" [1884]). But even these poems seem less like
schoolroom exercises than poems in which Kipling is beginning to question where he
might fit in a tradition of English poetry that seems to him disconcertingly alien. In
"Amour de Voyage" (1884), for example, a poem commemorating a fleeting shipboard
romance, the world-weary cynicism seems an unlikely and unattractive posture for a
nineteen-year-old to assume: "And what is a month in love but an age? / And who in their
senses would wish for more?" But perhaps the poem is an exercise in the manner of a
poet such as Arthur Symons that contrives to represent the manner as almost as foreign as
Burns's.
The "universal foreignness" that Eliot so astutely recognized in Kipling goes
beyond geography. It defines his relation to the whole tradition of poetry within which
and against which he writes. The early "Sestina of the Tramp-Royal" (1896) may be
uncharacteristic in its verse form, but it is typical of much of Kipling's verse in its jaunty
effrontery: "Speakin' in general, I 'ave tried 'em all -- / The 'appy roads that take you o'er
the world." Kipling wears the courtly verse form as the tramp might wear some discarded
top hat he had come across. The effect is still more pronounced in another poem of the
same year, "When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre." Kipling's posture may be defensive,
the self-protective stratagem of a poet who feels his lack of a university education, but he
assumes it with a winning swagger. In "The Song of the Banjo" from the same volume,
he offers the banjo with its "Pilly-willy-winky-winky-popp" as figuring his own poetry
8 more appropriately than the lyre. It seems a self-deprecating choice, and yet it allows the
boast that banjo poetry can function in rougher terrain than poetry with more pretensions:
You couldn't pack a Broadwood half a mile -You mustn't leave a fiddle in the damp -You couldn't raft an organ up the Nile,
And play it in an Equatorial swamp.
Although Kipling had next to nothing in common with the Modernists who were
his contemporaries, he shared with a Modernist such as the French painter Picabia a
fascination with machines. In "The Secret of the Machines" (1911), they speak for
themselves: "We were cast and wrought and hammered to design, / We were cut and filed
and tooled and gauged to fit." Kipling evidently means to suggest an analogy between the
excellence of their construction and of the poem that celebrates them. But for Picabia the
machine becomes a work of art only when it is stripped of its function, whereas for
Kipling the beauty of the machine is a product of its functionality. "McAndrew's Hymn"
(1893) may borrow a rhetoric from Burns's "Holy Willie's Prayer," but Kipling's
engineer, despite his sexual incontinence, is almost wholly sympathetic. Kipling clearly
admires his willingness to understand engineering as a kind of worship: "From couplerflange to spindle guide I see Thy Hand, O God." The shipowner who speaks "The Mary
Gloster," written in the following year, is less winning. The contempt with which he
views his son's rooms may express something of Kipling's feelings towards his decadent
contemporaries: "you muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's an' fans, /
And your rooms at college was beastly -- more like a whore's than a man's." But the
9 disreputable old man is disgusted not just by his son's effeminacy but also by his
contempt for the workaday world within which the father has acquired the wherewithal to
finance his son's lifestyle.
Throughout his career, Kipling was intolerant of the notion that poetry might, like
china and fans, simply be decorative. If, as Auden was to put it, "poetry makes nothing
happen," then so much the worse for poetry is what Kipling seems to have felt. Poetry
should work for its living, which is why so many of his poems are written to the moment,
in response to particular events; a legislative decision, a military setback, a political
campaign. The poems respond to newspaper reports and Kipling often chose to publish
them first in the newspapers that carried the reports. Kipling was not in any ordinary
sense an experimental poet. Yet in retrospect he may be recognized as having conducted
the boldest experiment of all: the attempt to restore poetry to the place it had once held
but had long since abandoned at the center of the public life of the nation. Whether the
attempt demands a reassessment of Kipling's status as a poet remains to be seen, but the
three handsome volumes housing Thomas Pinney's formidable scholarly achievement lay
before the reader for the first time all the materials on which any such reassessment must
be founded.
Richard Cronin is Professor of Romantic and Victorian Poetry in the School of Critical
Studies at the University of Glasgow.