On the 30th of December 1865, Rudyard Kipling – probably the finest poet of the modern age – was born. A man inextricably linked with the British Empire, and especially to the Empire in Southern Africa, Kipling won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907 – he was the first English-language writer to win the award, and also (at just 41) still the youngest winner of the prize.
Famous for stories such as ‘The Jungle Book’, ‘The Just So Stories’, ‘The Man who would be King’, and ‘Kim’, Kipling also wrote endless magnificent poems like ‘Gunga-Din’, ‘The White Man’s Burden’, ‘The Female of the Species’, ‘Recessional’ and, probably best of all, ‘If-‘
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Something old , something new , something familiar …
The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Volume 4: 1911-19
https://www.uipress.uiowa.edu/books/9780877456575/the-letters-of-rudyard-kipling-volume-4-1911-19
“[W]e are all sitting in the middle of wrecked hopes and broken dreams. . . . But you will not go out of the game–except for the necessary minute to step aside and vomit. You are young and the bulk of the men in charge are old, cold, and of intolerable entrails and a lot of ’em will be dropping out soon.”
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