Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865 in Bombay, where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was employed as a teacher of sculpture at the Bombay School of Art and Industry. Brought up largely by servants of various races and religions, he was familiar as a child with the stories and proverbs of several cultures, and spoke kitchen Hindustani more readily than English. In 1871 he and his younger sister were taken by their parents to England, where they were left in Southsea in the care of an elderly relative who ill-treated Rudyard but apparently not his sister. At twelve years old he was sent to the United Services College, a boarding school in Westward Ho!, Devonshire, for the sons of officers in the armed forces; after a rather unhappy first year he made durable friendships and enjoyed his schoolda~. From 1882 to 1889 he worked as a journalist on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette.
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This edition of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) includes all the poems contained in the Definitive Edition of 1940. In his lifetime,Kipling was widely regarded as the unofficial Poet Laureate, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.
His poetry is striking for its many rhythms and popular forms of speech, and Kipling was equally at home with dramatic monologues as he was with extended ballads. He is often thought of as glorifying war,militarism and the British Empire, but an attractive reading of his poems does not confirm that view.
This edition reprints George Orwell's hard-hitting accouni of Kipling's poems, first published in 1942, and generally regarded as one of the most important contributions to critical discussion of Kipling.
Prelude
A General Summary
Army Headquarters
Study of an Elevation. in
Indian Ink
Delilah
A Legend of the Foreign Office
The Story of Uriah
The Post that Fitted
A Code of Morals
Public Waste
What Happened
The Man Who Could Write
Pink Dominoes
Municipal
The Last Department
My Rival
To the Unknown Goddess
The Rupaiyat of Omar Kal'vin
PageR, MP
La Nuit Blanche
The Lovers' Litany
A Ballade of Burial
The Overland Mail
Divided Destinies
The Masque of Plenty
The Mare's Nest
The Ballad of Fisher's Boarding-
House
Possibilities
Arithmetic on the Frontier
The Song of the Women
The Betrothed
A Ballade of Jakko Hill
The Plea of the Simla Dancers
'As the Bell Clinks'
Christmas in India
The Grave of the Hundred Head
An Old Song
Certain Maxims of Hafiz
The Moon of Other Days
The Fall ofJock Gillespie
What the People Said
The Undertaker's Horse
One Viceroy Resigns
The Galley-Slave
A Tale of Two Cities
In Springtime
Giffen's Debt
Two Months
L'Envoi
The Fires
Dedication from Barrack-Roam
Baliads
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