On Rudyard Kipling

Let’s consider a writer who almost everyone approaches politically: Rudyard Kipling. This is understandable because Kipling often writes quite politically. (The author of a poem with so infamous a title as “The White Man’s Burden” can’t exactly claim to be courting an apolitical response.) For this reason, it has been standard practice since the early 20^th Century to be grievously offended by Kipling in total. We find only the most cautious praise commingling with pages of censorious moralizing in essays by George Orwell, Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Frank O’Connor, and Edward Said, among others. They all admit that Kipling is a significant artist, but his views are “intolerant and vindictive.” O’Connor even attacks Kipling’s obvious gift for physical description, writing, “Kipling loves the physical only if the physical happens to be his side and to be well equipped with repeating rifles.” Wilson goes so far as to say, “The whole work of Kipling’s life is to be shot through with hatred.”