How, asked T. S. Eliot as long ago as 1941, are we to read Kipling? The difficulty arises in large part from the relation between tradition and this particular, to Eliot's mind this peculiar, individual talent. “I confess,” Eliot writes, “that the critical tools which we are accustomed to use…do not seem to work” in Kipling's case. Despite his importance to late-Victorian culture, Kipling strikes Eliot as “the most inscrutable of authors,” a “unique” figure without literary ancestors or heirs. He is distinguished by what Eliot thinks of as a “universal foreignness,” as well as by a “peculiar detachment and remoteness” from his audience, his material, and his milieu. All of which makes him a writer “impossible wholly to understand.”

Eliot's is not the Kipling we are likely to be familiar with. It is certainly not the Kipling of contemporary criticism, which invariably places this author at the untroubled center of an era whose most interesting activities occurred almost exclusively on the margins. Studies of the period, including the present one, have always stressed the transgressive quality of fin-de-siècle writing, its calculated and often spectacular deviances. Deviances require norms, however, and Kipling traditionally has been invoked as their most visible embodiment. He is taken as “a spokesman for the age,” a “profoundly representative consciousness” who gave “expression to a whole range of national experience.”