“It is easy enough to find his stale politics ridiculous, an ineluctable vulgarity in the perpetual knowingness of his unchanging wink. But Mr. Kipling, in his true perspective, is something more than a warning to young poets or a monument of late-Victorian Imperialism. He sharpened the English language to a knife-edge, and with it he has cut brilliant patterns on the surface of our prose literature. At least two of the best stories in the world are somewhere behind that short line of red book-backs; and scattered up and down inside the books are scores of vivid little etchings, fit for a place in any portfolio – blazing sunlight, some seascapes of the North Atlantic, frontier fighting, a dozen men, some women, and one doleful little boy. He has made his contribution to letters; and one day, when the new voices are less insistent and through a silence we can catch his strange, halting tones, it will be remembered.”
More about Kipling can be read here.
