Despite radically divergent political and aesthetic
objectives at the commencement of their careers as writers, later the literary
paths of William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling converged at moments, each
seemingly imbibing from the other valuable pointers that they incorporated in
their work. This paper examines these overlappings and suggests that
alongside obvious differences of concern, there was an undercurrent of sympathy
between them, especially in the assimilation of India in their thought. While
Yeats mentions Kipling several times with varying attitudes, Kipling – as far
as my survey goes – never directly mentions Yeats, though I do suggest that
there is at least one instance of what might seem to be an oblique reference to
the early work of Yeats – slightly ironic and disparaging – around the time
when Kipling visited Canada in 1907. Further, in the last decade of his
life Yeats included two poems of Kipling in his The Oxford Book of Modern Verse: 1892-1935, and regretted that he
could not include more on account of the prohibitively expensive copyright
charges then prevalent.
What could have been the reasons for Yeats having
chosen these two poems? Could he have been influenced by Kipling's Lama
in Kim, since Yeats, too, was
involved with Bhagwan Shri Hamsa and his pilgrimage up to Lake
Mansarowar? And, reciprocally, did Kipling imbibe from Yeats the tinge of
mysticism in stories like "They" and "The Gardener" that he
wrote after the deaths of his daughter Josephine in 1899 and his son John in
1915? These are some of the questions my paper addresses.
Prof. Rupin W. Desai is retired from the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. He may be contacted at desairupin@yahoo.in.