Rudyard Kipling 100 Poems Old and New, edited by Thomas Pinney

Even people who don’t read much poetry know some lines from Kipling.

‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’
‘If you can keep your head when all about you’
‘Watch the wall my darling, while the gentlemen go by’
‘The Colonel’s Lady an’ Judy O’Grady Are sisters under their skins’
‘They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago.’
If you’re my age, you may have sung Non Nobis Domine at school and know the chorus of The Road to Mandalay because it was so familiar to your parents. If memorability is one of the criteria for great poetry, Kipling is up there.

This new selection, published by Cambridge University Press, is taken from the same editor’s massive work containing the complete poems. Thomas Pinney has chosen 100 of these, twenty five of which must be old, that is, well known, and seventy five new; poems never reprinted by Kipling. He writes:

“The idea of this selection from Rudyard Kipling’s many poems is to contrast the familiar with the unfamiliar: the list includes 25 of the first kind, and 75 of the second. Any collection will have those first 25; no other collection will have all 75 of the other kind – probably not more than one or two, if any. They come from many different sources, a few of them unpublished, none of them ever reprinted by Kipling himself. They have rested, unvisited, in inaccessible Indian newspapers, in manuscript, in the files of long-dead magazines.”

We are never told which are the familiar ones, a possible problem for someone coming to Kipling for the first time. What I wanted from the good professor was a little explanation as to why he chose just those twenty five familiar poems and those seventy five unfamiliar ones? This is the kind of book it’s very frustrating to read on a Kindle. You keep wanting to flip back and forth, checking this and that, and it’s a tedious business. I have two collections with which to compare this one: Songs for Youth, 1924 and A Choice of Kipling’s Verse made by T S Eliot with an Essay on Rudyard Kipling , 1941. I decided to read every one of the 100 poems and compare the choices made in the other books.
( lots more )