Long Trail
Selected Poems
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was, as T. S. Eliot recognised, a supreme ballad-maker, a storyteller who relished the adventures and characters encountered in the wide world, and a man whose sympathies lay with those whose work and dedication sustained civic and political institutions. With humour, rhythmical skill and a gift for the unforgettable phrase, Kipling's poems have passed into common currency: "If -", "Mandalay", "Gunga Din"... Harry Ricketts includes these in his selection, and many more. He also introduces a less familiar Kipling, lyrical, funny, compassionate, capable of bleak and savage satire. Often seen only as a laureate of empire, Kipling also speaks for the dispossessed and the victims of war. His fingerprints, Ricketts writes, "are smudged all over twentieth-century literature": he affected Sassoon, Joyce, Auden and Brecht, and he still provides the necessary words at times of crisis.
About the Author
Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865, where his father taught at the government school of art. In 1871, he and his even younger sister were sent back to England to live with a family called the Holloways, a time of his life he always remembered as deeply unhappy. After attending United Services College in Devon, he returned to India in 1882 to become a journalist in Lahore, later moving to Allahabad. His experiences during this period provided the material for the poems and stories that were published as "Departmental Ditties" (1886) and "Plain Tales from the Hills" (1888). In 1889 Kipling returned to England, publishing "Barrack-Room Ballads" in 1892, the year in which he married and moved to Vermont, where he lived until 1896. In addition to his prolific career as a prose writer, Kipling produced several more collections of verse, most notably "The Seven Seas" (1896), "The Five Nations" (1903) and "The Years Between" (1919). In 1902 he settled at Bateman's in Sussex with his family, although he continued to travel widely. In 1907 he became the first English writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He died in 1936.
