If?

"If—" is a notable poem by Rudyard Kipling. It was written in 1895; the poem was first published in the Brother Square Toes chapter of Rewards and Fairies, Kipling's 1910 collection of short stories and poems. Like William Ernest Henley's Invictus, it is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism and the "stiff upper lip" that popular culture has made into a traditional British virtue. Its status is confirmed by the number of parodies it has inspired.

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According to Kipling in his autobiography Something Of Myself (1937), the poem was inspired by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led a disastrous raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kipling-if.html This defeat increased the tensions that ultimately led to the Boer War. The British press, however, portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster, and the actual defeat as a British victory.

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"If—" holds the world record as the poem reprinted in more anthologies than any other. In a 1995 BBC opinion poll, it was voted the most popular poem of all time in the United Kingdom. Kipling himself noted in Something Of Myself that the poem had been "anthologised to weariness".

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Despite the poem's immense popularity many critics deride "If—" as little more than doggerel and a list of aphorisms strung together. T. S. Eliot used it to argue that Kipling was only a versifier and not a real poet. George Orwell—an ambivalent admirer of Kipling's work who hated the poet's politics—compared people who only knew "If—" "and some of his more sententious poems", to Colonel Blimp.

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Rudyard Kipling: Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was a British author and poet, born in India. He is best known for the children's story The Jungle Book (1894), the Indian spy novel Kim (1901), the poems "Gunga Din" (1892), "If— " (1895), and his many short stories....

1895: 1895 was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar)....

1910: 1910 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar)....