Volume 49, Number 12 · July 18, 2002
The King's Trumpeter
By John Bayley
The Long Recessional:The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling
by David Gilmour
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 351 pp., $26.00
Before Kipling, the art of polemics in poetry had scarcely been practiced in England since the days of Dryden and Pope. Apart from his other achievements in verse and prose, Kipling revived this art, and he transformed it as well. Dryden and Pope were professionals, superb artists in social and political satire who did not bother to believe passionately what they were saying, or to loathe with equal passion what their opponents stood for. Kipling, equally skillful as a writer in action, did both these things. He never laughed or mocked his opponents as Dryden had done—'showing his teeth with a smile,' as Mark Van Doren put it. He hated them, and his hatred was in deadly earnest, often—if he genuinely felt the Empire, or his idea of it, was threatened—to the point of shrillness and hysteria.
Review, 3666 words
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