OK, I promise, this is the last in the my favorite authors series I am going to be doing about dead white European males - not that I have exhausted the subject, but I fear I get tiresome on this, and I don't want to start sounding like undergraduate 'Western Civ'. Nevertheless, good writing is good writing, and, more to the point, as this is a progressive site, I think there are things in the canon that every good progressive can take to heart. The issues change less, perhaps, than is obvious.
It is also here that I reiterate my promise and request for all those reading this, if you have a favorite author yourself: The series is really supposed to be collaborative in that I would like my fellow Kossacks on R&BLers to sound off on their own favorites, and why that is so, and what we can learn from them. You might even influence a person or two.
Because I do think, as I believe many others do, that good writing exerts an influence that goes beyond the place and time it is written. Sometimes even bad writing does, if it coherently expresses ideas that a population is ready to hear. And the combination of superb writing and superb ideas, well in a way that is why we have Western Civ in the first place. Or, as Percy Bysshe Shelley said "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". Auden, who lived a hundred and fifty years later - and did not agree - did say "Whatever its actual content and overt interest, every poem is rooted in imaginative awe. Poetry can do a hundred and one things, delight, sadden, disturb, instruct--it may express every possible shade of emotion, and describe every conceivable kind of event, but there is only one thing that all poetry must do: It must praise all it can for being and happening."
Which brings us to the poetry of Joseph Rudyard Kipling. Let's indulge in a little verse tonight. It even rhymes.