It has recently been gathered together and valuably edited by Andrew Rutherford as Early Verse by Rudyard Kipling 1879–1889 (Oxford, 1986).

The first volume of his own poetry that Kipling himself authorized was Departmental Ditties (Lahore, 1886). This was followed, at distinct points in his career, by Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892), The Seven Seas (1896), The Five Nations (1903) and The Years Between (1919). All five books contained new poems collected together with poems which had already appeared in newspapers and magazines, sometimes many years earlier. Whether new or reprinted, these poems were by no means the whole of his poetic output.

From the beginning of his public career as a writer Kipling experimented with the linking together of poetry and prose. Sometimes this took the simple form of a few lines of poetry serving as an epigraph to a story; at other times, a poem, song, or ballad within a story; or, increasingly, poems which framed and commented on the story. Many of his books which are thought of habitually as volumes of short stories are, in fact, combinations of stories and poems. Very often the story as originally published in a magazine did not carry the poems with it: these were added when the story was collected with others for book publication. In such cases the publication dates of prose and poetry may be quite different, and, unless external evidence is available, the poems’ dates of composition difficult to fix. Furthermore, when reprinting these particular poems, Kipling did not include them in his other volumes of poetry but collected them in a separate volume called Songs from Books (1913), with many of the poems expanded or rewritten.

There were also poems which Kipling did not choose, for one reason or another, to reprint or collect immediately: political satire published in newspapers; a few lines of poetry accompanying travel articles; poems already reprinted without his permission by American ‘pirates’; contributions to books by other authors and to various fund-raising organizations; and poems written specifically for clearly defined separate publication, the most important instance of this being the twenty-three poems he contributed to C.R.L. Fletcher’s A History of England (1911). As editions and selections of his poetry multiplied haphazardly in Britain and America (including a misleadingly titled Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling in 1912), it became clear that a reliable, easily accessible collected edition was badly needed. The result was Rudyard Kipling’s Verse: Inclusive Edition 1885–1918, published by Hodder & Stoughton in three volumes in 1919, and in a single volume two years later. Far from clarifying the situation, it added to the confusion in ways that have affected Kipling’s reputation down to the present day.

It did not much matter that this Inclusive Edition was not actually ‘inclusive’, or that it carried no editorial explanation or guidance: the textual authority of the individual poems was generally reliable, and that seems to have been Kipling’s main concern. The problem lies in the way the poems were arranged. It is probable that Kipling intended initially to order the poems chronologically, beginning with Departmental Ditties, but soon changed his mind and started to group poems according to subject. Neither policy was followed through: if there was once a consistent editorial policy it is no longer discernible. Early and late poems are placed close together, Boer War poems are linked with First World War poems, and blocks of ‘songs’ and epigraphs from the prose works are inserted arbitrarily. To give some semblance of order, dates were placed beneath the titles of many of the poems, but these dates may refer to the subject of a particular poem, or its original publication, or its composition, and very often there is no indication which meaning is intended. The Inclusive Edition was reprinted in 1927 and 1933, each time with new poems added. In 1940, four years after Kipling’s death, yet more poems were included and the title of the volume changed to the Definitive Edition. It has been reprinted in that form ever since.

During the final years of his life Kipling revised all his published works for the Sussex Edition (35 vols, 1937–9). The poetry was grouped according to the volumes in which it had been collected originally, with the ‘songs from books’ expanded and placed in a separate section, and other poems placed under the heading ‘Miscellaneous’. Unfortunately the Sussex was a limited, expensive publication, and it was the bulky, chaotically organized, one-volume Definitive Edition that remained readily available in print. For the reader who, having enjoyed, say, Barrack-Room Ballads or the poems in Puck of Pook’s Hill, wished to read further in Kipling’s poetry, the Definitive Edition will often have acted as a disincentive. And, because of the special authority the Definitive seemed to carry, it tended to affect Kipling’s reputation as a poet in other ways as well. By far the most influential volume of the poetry published in the last fifty years has been T.S. Eliot’s A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941). The essay on Kipling which prefaced the selection is justly celebrated, but in putting the poems together Eliot followed the order laid down by the Definitive Edition and in doing so encouraged the misleading view that there is little change or development in Kipling’s poetry.

The present edition contains something like a quarter of the poetry that Kipling published in his lifetime. I have selected poems from every phase of Kipling’s career, starting with Departmental Ditties. I have included none of his juvenilia and none of the poems written in India which he himself decided not to select for Departmental Ditties: all of these are conveniently available in Andrew Rutherford’s edition Early Verse.