Poets and their visions 18 – Rudyard Kipling

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Boots, Danny Deever, Genius, Gunga Din, Harold Bloom, India, One Man Show of Kipling, Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poems, Poetry, Richard de Zoysa, Rudyard Kipling, Sussex, The Ballad of East and West, The Explorer, The Way through the Woods

The poet with perhaps the widest range, of both material and tone, was I think Rudyard Kipling. Though much better known as a writer of fiction, his poetry too is fascinating. Bloom leaves him out of his book of Genius, which is understandable given the distinctively American perspective he brings to bear. Kipling’s genius on the contrary was quintessentially English, though I should say English in terms of the colonial experience that governed the thinking of England for so long, as well as adulation of the countryside, which is a particularly British trait (though shared with colonial writers, and the Russians, which confirms my view that the British, when they cease to be sanctimonious, are capable of greater cultural sensitivity than most Westerners).

Kim, which exemplifies all this, is undoubtedly a great book. The same cannot be said of any particular poem that Kipling wrote. But the corpus as a whole is readable and memorable. And it can also surprise. Kipling, the poet of empire, when asked to write something for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, wrote a warning against hubris that is still the best advice available for any politician thinking himself successful–God of our fathers, known of old,

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Poets and their visions 8 – Mathew Arnold

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Alfred Lord Tennyson, Dover Beach, Eminent Victorians, Empedocles on Etna, John Keats, Mahabharatha, Mathew Arnold, Nature red in tooth and claw, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poems, Poetry, Robert Browning, Sarachchandra, Sinhabahu, Sohrab and Rustum, The Scholar Gypsy, To Marguerite, Tom Brown’s Schooldays

In the sense in which we generally use the term, Mathew Arnold was the most Victorian of the poets, perhaps of the writers, of the 19^th century. Tennyson and Browning led highly individualistic lives, and the ideas and the emotions they conveyed were characteristic of that age of extremely exciting change. But we are more conscious now of the continuities of that age, and perhaps, under the influence of the debunking of the next generation, in particular Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, we see it as stolid and serious.

Mathew Arnold’s life was emphatically serious. He was an Inspector of Schools, in a context in which one might claim that in fact the greatest contribution of the Victorians to social continuity and development was education. Arnold was born to that tradition, for his father was Thomas Arnold, the legendary headmaster of Rugby, who transformed public school education into a serious and intellectually stimulating process. Unfortunately he is remembered best for his institutionalization of games, because of the rousing impact of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, written by one of his less brilliant pupils, Tom Hughes. But even the fact that Hughes was an idealist of sorts, concerned to do his bit for society, is a tribute to Arnold’s introduction of an ethos of commitment, and the socialization he brought to a system that had previously been indulgent to the idiosyncrasies of the rich and purely functional with regard to the less fortunate.

Poets and their visions 5 – Keats

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Autumn, Homer, Isabella, John Keats, Lamia, lyric and elegy together, Negative Capability, Ode on Melancholy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poems, Poetry, The Eve of St. Agnes, The Grecian Urn

Keats was just 25 when he died, in 1821, but there is no argument whatsoever about his reputation. The work he produced in his few years of poetic effusion is almost universally considered outstanding.

It is easy to understand why, if one considers only the great Odes on which largely his reputation rests. There is a unity of tone in all of them, but the subject matter that rouses his melancholia differs widely. The Grecian Urn is an inanimate object, of beauty, but also of animation, which allows a characteristic perception

 

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Poets and their visions 4 – Shelley

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Adonais, George Gordon Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poems, Poetry, The Masque of Anarchy, The Skylark, The West Wind, Vanity of Human Wishes, When the Lamp is shattered

Shelley, four years younger than Byron and nearly four years older than Keats, seems somehow sandwiched between them. He does not command the admiration, indeed adulation, that either of them does, and indeed there was a time when his work was belittled in Sri Lanka, when the Leavis-Ludowyke determination to find moral relevance in all writing held sway.

The simplicity of his Odes seemed then to indicate a less substantial vision than that of Keats, whose six great Odes are charged with philosophical as well as emotional intensity. But if Shelley’s aspirations were more basic, they are conveyed with a inspirational power that only the most jaundiced can resist. And if the ideas are not subtle, they are no less thoughtful, as these two different stanzas from The Skylark indicate.