Dylan Thomas denounced him as standing "for everything in this cankered world which I would wish were otherwise." But the poet of Empire and "the white man's burden" has just been hailed as Britain's favorite poet.
Or, to be precise, the favorite of an unknown number of callers who thought it was worth 25 pence, (about 40 cents), per call to join a phone-in poll set up by the BBC as part of Poetry Day last Friday. Among 7,500 callers, who spread their votes over more than 1,000 poems, Kipling's "If" was most frequently mentioned. He was also mentioned most often among 200-plus authors.
"If" is an older man's advice to the young:
"If you can fill the unforgiving minute
"With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
"Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
"And -- which is more -- you'll be a man, my son!"
The BBC refused to say how many votes Kipling actually won, but it did say that "If" pulled twice as many votes as "Lady of Shalott" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. If 7,500 seems a small cross section of the 55 million residents of the United Kingdom, it's a fair reflection of poetry's place in the market.
Poetry accounts for about 0.8 percent of the 300 million consumer books sold in the country each year, just a sliver of a ?2.7 billion ($4.8 billion) a year publishing market, according to an industry research firm.
So what did it all mean, this small national vote for a poem inspired by an incident in the Boer War, at the high tide of empire?
Daisy Goodwin, editor of the BBC's "Bookworm" program, opined that it spoke of a "nation desperate for a leader who can 'keep his head while all about others are losing theirs.'"
John Carey, Merton professor of English literature at Oxford University, suggested that Kipling won because the voters probably weren't in the first bloom of youth, but "were remembering poems they had seen anthologized when they were young."
"In the end, the judgments don't entirely make sense. You can't even pick a favorite poem for yourself, it depends on the time of day and how you're feeling," said Carey, who nonetheless favors such competitions.
"What they do is sell books, and increase interest in poetry. The fact is that more people will read those poems than before, and I think that's good."
Kipling, who died in 1936, was enormously famous in his day, and in 1907 was the first English writer to win the Nobel prize for literature. But a reaction developed against what some saw as Kipling's jingoism in poems such as "White Man's Burden," written in 1899 and addressed to the United States as the new ruler of the Philippines:
"Take up the White Man's burden --
"Send forth the best ye breed ...
"To wait in heavy harness
"On fluttered folk and wild --
"Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
"Half devil and half child ..."
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