london: Kipling scholars are celebrating the publication of lost poems by the author whose exhortations in If to “keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you” are regularly voted the nation’s favourite poem.
Thomas Pinney, a US scholar, discovered more than 50 previously unpublished Kipling poems in an array of places including family papers, the archive of a former head of the Cunard Line, and during renovations at a Manhattan house. The works will be published alongside more than 1,300 of the author’s other poems in the three-volume Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling, the first ever complete edition of his verse, out on March 7.
Several poems date from the First World War, which Kipling initially supported, helping his son John to gain a commission in the Irish Guards. A short poem, The Gambler, finishes with the couplet: “Three times wounded; three times gassed/Three times wrecked — I lost at last”, while another fragment runs: “This was a Godlike soul before it was crazed/No matter. The grave makes whole.” After his son’s death at the Battle of Loos in 1915, Kipling regretted his earlier enthusiasm for the conflict, writing in his Epitaphs of the War: “If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied”.
Another poem discovered by Pinney, The Press, prefigures contemporary worries over media intrusion. “Have you any morals?/Does your genius burn?/Was your wife a what’s its name?/How much did she earn?” wrote the poet in a fit of anger at the questions he was asked by journalists.
“Why don’t you write a play -/Why don’t you cut your hair?/Do you trim your toe-nails round/Or do you trim them square?”
By arrangement with the Guardian
