Doug:
(picking splinters from my brain)
> >And behind +that+ is Kipling and Danny Deever.
>
>
> I'd agree on that. Kipling as progenitor of Service, & a lot of the
> bush poets in Australia too?
Kipling has to mark a turning-point. But bush poetry crops up in the oddest
places -- Wilde's "Reading Jail", frinstance [back to Kipling, again], and
even here and there in Peter Porter.
Auden fingered a bit of it in _The Oxford Book of Light Verse_.
I think some of it is the-masters-of-war stuff -- it's possible to run an
anti-war line [the poets Colin Powell reads in bed at night when he wakes up
thinking that he really +should+ have run against Dubya in the Republican
primaries] back to Anacreon. And the really +edged+ antiwar poems
(Anacreon, Gascoigne) are written by Other Ranks.
{Ah, the usual WWI listing -- Sassoon and Owen were officer-class, Rosenberg
and Edward Thomas signed up as rankers. As did, of all people, the Ultimate
English Gentleman, Saki (H.H.Monro). With one of the few truly documented
Dying Words: "Put out that bloody cigarette!"}
Which is a lot of where Kipling is at.
And just exactly where "Vita Lampada" +isn't+ at.
Robin
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