Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Biography of Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born December 30, 1865, in Bombay, India, to a British family. When he was five years old, he was taken to England to begin his education, where he suffered deep feelings of abandonment and confusion after living a pampered lifestyle as a colonial. He returned to India at the age of seventeen to work as a journalist and editor for the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore. Kipling published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses, in 1886 and his first collection of stories, Plain Tales from the Hills, in 1888.

In the early 1890s some of his poems were published in William Ernest Henley’s National Observer and later collected in to Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), an immensely popular collection which contained “Gunga Din” and “Mandalay.” In 1892 Kipling married and moved to Vermont, where he published the two Jungle Books and began work on Kim. He returned to England with his family in 1896 and published another novel, Captains Courageous. Kipling visited South Africa during the Boer War, editing a newspaper there and writing the Just-So Stories. Kim, Kipling’s most successful novel (and his last), appeared in 1901. The Kipling family moved to Sussex permanently in 1902, and he devoted the rest of his life to writing poetry and short stories, including his most famous poem, "If—". He died on January 18, 1936; his ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey.

Poems by Rudyard Kipling

  1. "For All We Have And Are"
  2. "The Trade"
  3. "Tin Fish"
  4. A Death-Bed
  5. A Pict Song
  6. A Pilgrim's Way
  7. An Almanac of Twelve Sports
  8. Cells
  9. Cities And Thrones And Powers
  10. Danny Deever
  11. Dedication
  12. Edgehill Fight
  13. Epitaphs of the War
  14. Fuzzy-wuzzy
  15. Gethsemane
  16. Gunga Din
  17. Harp Song of the Dane Women
  18. If—
  19. Justice
  20. Loot
  21. Mesopotamia
  22. My Boy Jack
  23. Recessional
  24. Screw-guns
  25. Sestina of the Tramp-Royal
  26. Soldier, Soldier
  27. Song of the Galley-Slaves
  28. The Answer
  29. The Ballad Of East And West
  30. The Bell Buoy
  31. The Benefactors
  32. The Children
  33. The City of Sleep
  34. The Disciple
  35. The Explanation
  36. The Female Of The Species
  37. The Gods Of The Copybook Headings
  38. The Legend Of Evil
  39. The Long Trail
  40. The Lost Legion
  41. The Miracles
  42. The Power Of The Dog
  43. The Secret of the Machines
  44. The Song of the Banjo
  45. The Song Of The Dead
  46. The Sons Of Martha
  47. The Vampire
  48. The Verdicts
  49. The White Man's Burden
  50. To Wolcott Balestier
  51. Tommy
  52. When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted