ABSTRACT
Despite radically divergent political and aesthetic objectives at the commencement of their careers as writers, the literary paths of William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling converged later on. This chapter 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. 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? 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.
