ABSTRACT
Kipling and Yeats led not only parallel but also curiously intertwined lives. Born in a colonial milieu, each was painfully wrenched from his boyhood haunts to be schooled in England, later rediscovering his homeland at the age of 16. Besides their interest in the visual arts, both men were similarly preoccupied with heroism, with folklore, balladry, and the demotic voice. They were drawn to heterodox religion, and each devoted much time to secretive and hierarchical orders – in Kipling’s case Freemasonry, in Yeats’s Theosophy, and later the Golden Dawn. Most of all, both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the ‘philomythic’, or myth-loving, impulse in fin-de-siècle culture. From the letters and memoirs left by their interlocutors and go-betweens, and from a study of their reception in contemporary periodicals, a picture of Kipling and Yeats embedded within their shared social nexus gradually emerges.
