This year, writes Kevin Myers, marks the 140th birthdays of two of the greatest poets of the English language: W.B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling.
The former is - properly - still revered everywhere, but regard for Kipling remains deeply unfashionable, and is largely confined to British academics and - of course - high Tories. For the much-vaunted and voguish and allegedly liberal "multiculturalism" does not extend to embracing the imperial culture of which he was the unofficial laureate.
Certainly, Yeats thought highly enough of Kipling to include some of his verse in the infamous Oxford anthology which he edited, but I have no idea what Kipling thought of him in return. I suspect Yeats's early Celtic mistiness would have caused an intemperate rush of blood to the Kipling head; but the meatier stuff of later years would probably have appealed.
They have more in common with each other than the year of their birth (although Rudyard managed to squeak in by a mere day). Both had Yorkshire blood in their veins, but more importantly, both were outsiders in the societies whose virtues they lauded. Kipling was born of British parents in India, moving finally to England only in adult life. Yeats was born in Dublin, of Protestant and emphatically unGaelic stock.
Yet each became versifiers of worlds they could only glimpse from the outside: not knowing those worlds in a truly personal sense, they were able to find beauty and magic where their natural inhabitants might have found merely humdrum mundanity and mediocrity. No farrier writes hymns to the forge, no sailor pens paeans to the sea.
Kipling was actually more remarkable is his emotional transferences, because his were many-directional. His childhood was spent among the European merchant classes of Bombay, but he got captivating insights into the real India through the household servants. Similarly, young William Butler Yeats was introduced to that Other Ireland in Sandymount, where the Yeatses' retainers usually spoke Irish.
But Kipling was also a stranger in England, which perhaps enabled him to love its ways with the detached enthusiasm of the outsider. Moreover, his enthusiasms were not confined to the peoples of the Raj and of Britain. He had an extraordinarily powerful affection for Ireland, and one of his most famous characters, Kim, was half-Irish. To be sure, it was an Ireland of his imagination, largely populated by stoutly loyal soldiery: My name is O'Kelly, I've heard the Revelly, From Birr to Bareilly, from Leeds to Lahore. But inevitably, when the people of Ireland let his vision down with their ambitions for Home Rule, he felt betrayed and enraged.
Irish nationalists, of course, remember him for his intemperate poem about the perils of Irish self-government Ulster 1912. But looked at coldly across the 90 years which separate us from then, how genuinely tolerant was Irish nationalism of Irish unionism? Never mind what we all know about the fate of Irish nationalists under a northern unionist government: were public expressions of unionist sympathy freely permitted in finally-independent Ireland 10 years or more after that poem was written?
Kipling was a man of great anger, and prey to the anti-Semitism which was extremely powerful across Europe at the time. Though this was deplorable, we should not view this bigotry solely through the lens of the Holocaust, nor was it the its inevitable precursor of the Final Solution. Yet even in his worst anti-Semitism, Kipling's pen found greater truths. In his froth-flecked fulminations over the elevation of the attorney general Sir Rufus Isaacs - who had benefited financially from insider-dealing - to Lord Chief Justice, he accurately summed up the conduct of all judges who have an eye on preferment. Search out and probe Gehazi,/ As thou of all canst try,/ The truthful, well-weighed answer/ That tells the blacker lie - Do these words not strike to the very heart of the Hamilton report on the beef tribunal?
Kipling's political unionism, both towards India and Ireland, was complex. It certainly was not racist. The often misquoted lines about east and west never meeting goes on: But there is neither East nor West, Border nor Breed nor Birth,/ When two strong men stand face to face though they come from the ends of the earth. The poem concludes with an Indian and Englishman becoming brothers-in-blood. On the other hand, he was an admirer of that abominable creature Cecil Rhodes.
But we should not judge Kipling by his friends or by today's political standards. It is as the coiner of some of the finest expressions in English that we should remember him. If is one the greatest and most irreducible, perfectly pitched poems in the language; but so too is The Gods of the Copybooks Headings, which combines great wisdom with unforgettable verse. And there is no angrier denunciation of war, and the vanities of generals, than Mesopotamia 1917 - But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,/ Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?
Both Yeats and Kipling receive four pages in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, though neither gets the space he deserves. Only one poet who was (roughly) a contemporary of theirs gets more, and that is T.S. Eliot, who particularly admired Kipling. He manages over five. No, he was not, like the other two, born in 1865; but all three have a certain chronological congruity: he died in 1965. Subtract these three great men - all of whose various anniversaries we should be marking this year - from the poetry in the English language of the past century-and-a-half, and barely a threadbare corpse remains.