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A site devoted to the English poet, novelist and short story writer
If you think of Kipling as a jingoistic Victorian who can't possibly have anything to say to anyone in the Third Millenium, your ideas need a shake up. Your children will love The Jungle Books (read Rikki Tikki Tavi aloud to them), and you will love the short stories, Kim and the other novels, and the poetry.
THE KIPLING SOCIETY was founded in 1927 by J H C Brooking and a few fellow enthusiasts, including Kipling's school-friends Major General L C Dunsterville and G C Beresford, who featured in Stalky & Co. as "Stalky" and "M'Turk". The Society prospered, and soon attracted hundreds of members from all over the world.
From Wikipedia:
"Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was a British author and poet, born in India. He is best known for the book of children's tales The Jungle Book (1894), the Indian spy novel Kim (1901), the poems "Gunga Din" (1892), and "If—" (1895), as well as many of his short stories. The height of Kipling's popularity was the first decade of the 20th century: in 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and still remains its youngest-ever recipient, as well as the first English language writer to receive the prize. In his own lifetime he was primarily regarded as a poet, and was offered a knighthood and the post of British poet laureate, though he turned them both down."
Everyone knows it, everyone quotes it, and here it is again:
IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
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