Home Search Every Field Editorial Search Authors' THE CAMBRIDGE EDITION OF THE POEMS OF RUDYARD KIPLING, 3 vols Responses Ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge, 2013), 3 vols, xlviii + 2349 pp. Guidelines Reviewed by Richard Cronin on 2013-08-09. For Click here for a PDF version. Reviewers Click here to buy the book on Amazon. About Us Masthead 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 Feedback 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 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 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 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 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. His admirers relish the swing of the verse, but his rhythmic effects can be surprisingly delicate.