Barrack Room Ballads And Other Poems

Author : Rudyard Kipling
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781980723417
Total Pages : 90 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (234 download)

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Download or read book Barrack-Room Ballads written by Rudyard Kipling and published by . This book was released on 2018-04-02 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Barrack-Room Ballads (published in 1892) are a series of songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling, dealing with the late-Victorian British Army and mostly written in a vernacular dialect. The series contains some of Kipling's most well-known work, including the poems "Gunga Din", "Tommy", "Mandalay", and "Danny Deever", helping consolidate his early fame as a poet. The first poems were published in the Scots Observer in the first half of 1890, and collected in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses in 1892. Kipling later returned to the theme in a group of poems collected in The Seven Seas under the same title. A third group of vernacular Army poems from the Boer War, titled "Service Songs" and published in The Five Nations (1903), can be considered part of the Ballads, as can a number of other uncollected pieces. While two volumes of Kipling's poems are clearly labelled as "Barrack-Room Ballads", identifying which poems should be grouped in this way can be complex. The main collection of the Ballads was published in the 1890s, in two volumes: Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892, the first major publishing success for Methuen) and The Seven Seas (1896), sometimes published as The Seven Seas and Further Barrack-Room Ballads. In both books, they were collected into a specific section set aside from the other poems, and can be easily identified. (Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses has an introductory poem ("To T.A.") in Kipling's own voice, which is strictly not part of the set but is often collected with them.) A third group of poems, published in 1903 in The Five Nations, continued the theme of military vernacular ballads; while they were titled "Service Songs", they fit well with the themes of the earlier ballads and are clearly connected. Charles Carrington produced the first comprehensive volume of the Ballads in 1973, mainly drawn from these three collections but including five additional pieces not previously collected under the title. AuthorJoseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If" (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story; his children's books are classics of children's literature, and one critic described his work as exhibiting "a versatile and luminous narrative gift". Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known." In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined. Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. George Orwell saw Kipling as "a jingo imperialist", explaining that he was "morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting". Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: "[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with."