CM, I think the passages you quoted above pretty much make my point. There's a great deal of wonderful sound in them, the music of the world he wants to evoke. If you're a teacher who means to bring students closer to poetry, you'll want them to read some of this. How much does it take before you're saying, "Well, here's another fine poem by Kipling with lots and lots of great sound?" And while they're reading and discussing yet another fine poem by Kipling, they're not reading something by someone else, time always being a big constraint. My point was not that Kipling's verse should be ignored, only that there are good reasons beyond knee-jerk liberalism for its not being widely assigned to college students.
Richard
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