lyrical poetry - OUDL Home

"THE NINETIESthat in the scattered British Empire and the BritishTommy in strange lands and the British sailor in trampsteamers, Kipling had found a new, romantic, andinspiring theme. Sir Francis Doyle had to a smallextent anticipated him, and Newbolt and Housmanand Hardy have endorsed his discovery, in the thensocially despised British Tommy, and the contact ofthat strange being with alien peoples and alien civilisations,one of the most romantic features in modernEnglish life and history. But Kipling's achievementas a poet is not confined to his successes in the earlyballads, Danny Deever and Mandalay and Ford 0' KabulRiver and M'Andrew's Hymn. As his stories havechanged so have his poems, acquiring a gentler, more'home-country tone and atmosphere, a purer, lessjournalistic art. When a careful anthology of Kipling'spoems comes to be made it will be a good deal smallerthan the " Inclusive Edition " of 1926, and the prideof place may be given not to the popular and ringingstrains that infected our generation, if they violentlyrepelled some readers, but to poems of a purer lyricalstrain as Puck's Song or Sussex or The Way Through theWood.In the quickening of the spirit of romance and inthe quest of the romantic in neglected and unexpectedquarters, Kipling had allies in Stevenson and Henley,who made their debut as poets between 1885 and 1888and were both forces in the literary life of the nineties.But neither is a singer in the way that, despite theirdifferent faults, both Meredith and Kipling are. Theyare delightful writers in verse of a lyrical or semilyricaltype. Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses isa better interpretation of the average young child'smoods and dreams than the Songs of Innocence, though137