This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. (2) Since the days of Classical Greece, a laurel wreath has been a symbolic victory prize. What is it today’s reader finds so repugnant about Kipling’s poem? If you were a citizen of a colonized territory, how would you respond to Kipling? Today he might yet gain appreciation as a transmitter of Indian culture to the West. As a writer, Kipling perhaps lived too long: by the time of his death in 1936, he had come to be reviled as the poet of British imperialism, though being regarded as a beloved children’s book author. After returning to England, he published “The White Man’s Burden” in 1899, an appeal to the United States to assume the task of developing the Philippines, recently won in the Spanish-American War. As a result of financial misfortune, from 1892-96 he and his wife, the daughter of an American publisher, lived in Vermont, where he wrote the two Jungle Books. Thus Kipling was thoroughly immersed in Indian culture: by 1890 he had published in English about 80 stories and ballads previously unknown outside India. Born in British India in 1865, Rudyard Kipling was educated in England before returning to India in 1882, where his father was a museum director and authority on Indian arts and crafts.
