Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
Kipling was a British writer, poet and Nobel laureate, best known for The Jungle Book, Kim and his poems about India and the British Empire. Born in Bombay (Mumbai), he grew up between India and England and became one of the most popular - and most controversial - writers of the Edwardian era.
The poem and its dedication
"If-" was written in 1895 and published in 1910 in Kipling's collection Rewards and Fairies. Kipling said the poem was inspired by Leander Starr Jameson, the leader of the failed "Jameson Raid" in South Africa, whom Kipling admired as a man of quiet courage. But the poem is framed as fatherly advice to Kipling's own son, John.
Personal tragedy
The poem takes on a devastating second meaning when you know that John Kipling was killed in 1915, aged 18, at the Battle of Loos in the First World War. Kipling had used his influence to get his short-sighted son into the army. He was haunted by guilt for the rest of his life, writing the line "If any question why we died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied."
Victorian and Edwardian values
The poem expresses the ideal of the Stoic Englishman: calm, self-reliant, emotionally disciplined and dutiful. These values were central to the British public-school system and to the running of the Empire. Kipling is often seen as the great poet of this ideal - both its defender and, after 1915, its mourner.
Reception
"If-" was voted Britain's favourite poem in a 1995 BBC poll and its lines are inscribed above the players' entrance at Wimbledon's Centre Court ("meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same"). Modern readers sometimes find its emotional repression troubling, but its influence is enormous.