50 Unpublished Kipling Poems Found

He might have been called the "jingo imperialist" by George Orwell, but Rudyard Kipling's "If" is one of Britain's favorite poems. And now, more than 50 unpublished Kipling poems have been found by American scholar Thomas Pinney. Pinney, an emeritus professor of English at Pomona College, said he looked through family papers, the archive of a former head of the cruise ship company Cunard Line, and inside a house in Manhattan. The collection includes works written during and after World War I, which Kipling initially supported, and he helped his son John gain a commission in the Irish Guards. He regretted his decision, however, after John died at the Battle of Loos in 1915, and Kipling writes about it in "Epitaphs of the War": "If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied." The 50 poems will be included in the three-volume The Cambridge Edition of The Poems of Rudyard Kipling, out on March 31.