Japanese-Style Poems on Free Thought, by Laura Kelly

I enjoyed your article, Dr. Salemi!

Don’t see how any real woman could fail to take “The Female of the Species is More Deadly Than the Male” as anything other than a magnificent compliment. (But pro-abortion feminists are unnatural women. May the Lord have mercy.)

In the intro to his Choice of Kipling’s Verse, T. S. Eliot does say that Kipling wasn’t “trying” to write poetry. But argues that he wrote poetry anyway and that it doesn’t make sense to try to draw a line between where his verse becomes poetry and where it doesn’t. Eliot clearly struggles with finding categories in his poetics to talk about what Kipling does and it’s kind of amusing. However his respect for Kipling shines through the somewhat tortured limits of his philosophy. He did a great job choosing poems for the anthology. It was a glorious read. In his essay and in his choice of verse, he succeeds in pointing up the claritas of Kipling’s genius. And it seems to me his honor for Kipling’s work carries into his own poetry. I hadn’t read “The Bell Buoy” before but it was impossible not be reminded of Eliot’s “perpetual angelus,” even though the tone of Kipling’s poem is from the other side of the universe from the Four Quartets.

Eliot had insight into the quality of Kipling’s love for Sussex: it was always the perspective of a foreign-born outsider, which sees things that sometimes more accustomed eyes can’t.

The non-iambic meters your article highlights are amazing. Kipling really swings them, as if without effort. Who can do that anymore?

A Kipling revival may be taking place at certain edges of the literary world. But, as your article points out, for hordes of deplorables who don’t follow fashions he’s been immortal all along.