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Kipling Vanguard
Kipling Vanguard
Kipling Vanguard
National Vanguard
from http://www.countercurrents.com/2011/12/rudyardkiplingthewhitemanspoet2/
One hundred years ago, in Lahore—today the second city in independent Pakistan but
then an administrative center in British India—a 17yearold subeditor, fresh out of
school in England, worked very hard to get out each day’s edition of the Civil and
Military Gazette. His name was Rudyard Kipling.
Every now and then the young subeditor, with his editor’s assent, would fill up a little
leftover space in the newspaper with a poem of his own composition, much to the
annoyance of the Indian typesetters, who did not like to use the special typefaces which
Kipling deemed appropriate to distinguish his poems from the prose around them. In
1886 he gathered up all of these poems from the previous three years and republished
them in a book, under the title Departmental Ditties. The book was an immediate hit with
other British colonials, and the first printing sold out very quickly.
Then it was one book after another, for from 1883 until his death in 1936 Kipling’s pen
was seldom idle; hardly a week went by that he did not write one or more poems. Because
his poetry expressed so well the common sentiment of the race—the deep soulsense of
men conscious of their breeding and of their responsibility to live up to a standard set by
their forebears—it became very popular with his fellows. He was by far the most widely
read—and the bestloved—poet writing in English at the beginning of this century; every
cultured person in the Englishspeaking world was familiar with at least some of his
poems. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Kipling chose as his symbol—his personal rune—the
swastika, the ancient Aryan sign of the sun and of
health and of good fortune. Most editions of his works
published in the first decades of this century are
adorned with this symbol. Beginning in 1933, however,
Jewish pressure was brought to bear against the
publishers, and the swastikas were dropped from
subsequent printings.