Fun with Kipling

[cosmolinguist]

We talked about Rudyard Kipling and his poetry today in my "British Imperial Imagination" class. The immediate vociferous reaction was negative, which surprised me a bit. But I was more surprised at how much I countered that. I never knew how much I like Kipling.

I love the rhythm and the rhymes in his poems. The cockney accent seems to bother everybody else, but I don't mind it--and can read it well enough to preserve the rhythms and rhyme intact, which I like--and the poems that reminded me of drinking songs are just fun.

He has a poem that says, "the female of the species is more deadly than the male." How can you not love that? I pointed this out to one of the people who was complaining about him. "That's true," she said. "But I still hate him." (In another class, for which I actually had to read that poem, someone in the class realized that you can sing it to the tune of..."The Beverly Hillbillies," I think. It was quite funny.)

Apparently Kipling liked--even idolized--sports, either despite or because of the fact that he couldn't play them well because he had bad eyesight. Gee, that sounds kind of familiar... So maybe I like him because he's like me.

He's complicated. He never seems to have anything good to say about the British Empire, but he's still totally pro-imperial. He's not idealistic, he knows the problems of empire, and still thinks it's worth it.

He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907 or something--the first British person to win it, we were told.

Brad, the professor, asked us, "Who was the first American to win, can anyone tell me?"

Silence. Then, "Albert Einstein."

"The first to win for literature," he reminded us.

But I had a different problem with this. "He wasn't American! He was German."

"But he emigrated here," the girl said. Sheesh.

Silly professor, always trying to keep it on task, repeated, "The first to win for literature."

"T.S. Eliot," someone said. (I don't think he's American either, perhaps since I studied him in a Brit lit class. The one where I learned the correlation between Kipling and the Beverly Hillbillies, actually.) I think our prof said it was earlier than T.S. Eliot.

"Mark Twain." The Nobel Prize didn't come along until after Mark Twain.

"Edgar Allan Poe." No, Edgar Allan Poe was even earlier than Mark Twain.

"He's a bit of a local hero," Brad told us. I had no idea who he could be talking about, but was about to be enlightened. After a small conflict about whether it was Sinclair Lewis or Upton Sinclair, I think we decided on Sinclair Lewis, who is apparently from Sauk Centre (which is like an hour from here, it's where you go to get on the freeway if you want to go to St. Cloud or the Cities...or Columbus, Ohio, for that matter).

"I didn't know he was from Sauk Centre," I said.

"It's what he wrote Main Street about," said the girl who'd said Einstein.

"I've never read Main Street," I replied.

"I started to," said the lady who'd said Edgar Allan Poe. "It was really boring." (Seems appropriate enough, since Sauk Centre, or at least the drive there from Morris, is famously boring.) Then she said something about gophers and stuff, which was drowned out by the silly professor making us talk about Kipling again.

Comments

[fantome14.livejournal.com]

T. S. Eliot was an American (very prominent Boston family) who went to Europe to work on his doctoral thesis in Philosophy, and never came back, not even to defend it. He settled in Britain and became a citizen. Both American and British Literature claim him as their own.

[fantome14.livejournal.com]

Well, scratch that, he came back at times. And he was born in St. Louis though his family was form Boston. Clearly I know far too much about the man.

[cosmolinguist]

I knew he's sorta British and sorta American, I just think of him as British since I had to study him with those other chaps. He can be American though; we need to have some cool people from this country...

[fantome14.livejournal.com]

Did you ever read any of his Four Quartets? I think they're his masterpiece.

[cosmolinguist]

Garrison Keillor says in the introduction to a book he edited (Good Poems, and that's what they are) that T. S. Eliot is "the American guy so smooth he passed for British."

[(Anonymous)]

Holly Michelle, how many times did I tell you that Sauk Centre is famous for being the home of Sinclair Lewis? Did I not tell you about the Sinclair Lewis museum and Sinclair Lewis Avenue, and also the original Main Street sign and the sign that says "the boyhood home of Sinclair Lewis"? Of course I did! Also, he couldn't stand Sauk Centre and left town forever. I didn't know he was the first American to win the nobel prize.