'The ambiguous status of Kipling's poetry', observes Jan Montefiore in her 2007 critical study Rudyard Kipling, 'is aptly summed up by Dan Jacobson's exasperated tribute to "Kipling, a poet I cannot abide yet cannot stop reading".' This sentence might stand as an epigraph for any discussion of Kipling's poetry.

Jacobson's remark was made in the Times Literary Supplement in 2005. A century earlier in 1904, a cartoon by Max Beerbohm was fuelled by a similar combination of extremes. (This was in the immediate aftermath of the Boer War, during which Kipling had 'come out' as the undisputed bard of empire and literary spokesperson for imperial values.) In the cartoon, a diminutive, check-suited Kipling, kicking up his heels and blowing on a toy trumpet, hangs on the arm of a tall, languid Britannia. The two have swapped hats: he wears her war helmet, she his bowler. She leans away, seemingly unimpressed by his pipsqueak imperial trumpetings. The caption, mimicking the cockney idiom of his soldier ballads, reads: 'Mr Rudyard Kipling takes a bloomin' day aht on the blasted 'eath, along with Britannia, 'is gurl.' Only someone well versed in Kipling's work could have put the knife in so wittily.