This book compares Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, from their births in 1865 up to 1903. The argument consists of parallel readings wed to a biographic structure. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts, heroism, folklore, balladry, and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the ‘mythopoeic’ impulse in fin de siècle culture. The methodology consists in identify ... More

This book compares Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, from their births in 1865 up to 1903. The argument consists of parallel readings wed to a biographic structure. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts, heroism, folklore, balladry, and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the ‘mythopoeic’ impulse in fin de siècle culture. The methodology consists in identifying these mutual echoes in both writers’ poetry and political rhetoric, before charting them against intersections in their lives. Kipling and Yeats were, for much of their careers, irreconcilable political enemies. However, a cross-reading of the two poets’ bardic ambitions, heroic tropes, and interpretations of history reveals that, to achieve their opposed political ends, they frequently partook of a common discourse. Supplementing this analysis with biographical context, we can trace these shared concerns to their late nineteenth-century artistic upbringing, and to the closely linked social circles which they inhabited in fin de siècle London. It is, in fact, their very mutuality during the 1890s which lent rancour to their ideological division after the Boer War. In turn, and in an argumentative spiral of revolving discourses, acrimony and denunciation merely served to bind together all the more intimately two men who were often proximate but actually met only in cartoons and satirical gossip.