AMBIGUOUS CONSERVATISM

The ambiguous status of Kipling's poetry is aptly summed up by Dan Jacobson's exasperated tribute to ‘Kipling, a poet I cannot abide yet cannot stop reading’. Kipling is not always recognized as a poet at all, yet his endlessly popular ‘If –’ was in 1995 voted the ‘Nation's Favourite Poem’; more tellingly still, he is one of the few English poets besides Shakespeare whose words have entered common usage. George Orwell's 1941 remark that ‘Nothing could exceed the contempt of the New Statesman for Kipling, but how many times during the Munich period did the New Statesman find itself quoting that phrase about paying the Dane-geld?’ remains pertinent today, Kipling's poems – or bits of them – having taken on a life of their own, often in ways that would have greatly surprised their author. If you type wellknown phrases from Kipling's verse into the search engine ‘Google’, you find them cited on both extreme right-wing websites and others of utterly different persuasions. ‘Never the twain shall meet’ from the ‘Ballad of East and West’ (W, 234) has been used as the title for articles on gender relations, on bipolar mental disorder, on overspending, on school syllabi, and on the arts/science division in intellectual life, not to mention a book on telecommunications.