ABSTRACT
Kipling published much of his early poetry in the Civil and Military Gazette and the Pioneer. This chapter considers the importance of those papers, and the newspaper in general, to that poetry. Kipling, as sub-editor (and occasional acting-editor) for each newspaper, had an intimate relationship with the newspaper as a literary medium. What is more, those newspapers, given the typically isolated, geographically diverse, and expatriate nature of their Anglo-Indian readers, played an unusually important role in constituting Anglo-Indian society. In this chapter, the ‘Departmental Ditties’ are read as the culmination of Kipling’s exploration of how he might best use the literary medium of the newspaper to interact with that audience. An argument is advanced which goes against the received view which sees Kipling’s newspaper-published poetry as small-scale and obscure, and Kipling as longing for the greater exposure that volume publication would bring. In its place, this chapter argues for the size and importance of Kipling’s newspaper audience, in geographic, numeric and cultural terms, and suggests that volume publication may usefully be seen as a somewhat secondary activity for Kipling. Kipling relished the multi-vocal and dialogic nature of the newspaper, and developed ways by which he might exploit its communal and editorial voices. Kipling’s sense of what poetry might do and be is argued to have been shaped by his sense of what newspapers did and were.
