Rudyyard Kipling : The Life Of Rudyard Kippling

In the cartoon, John Bull and Uncle Sam, who represent Britain and America respectively, are portrayed to climb the mountain with carrying the burden of people from the colonised territories of Britain (China, India, Egypt, and Soudan) and America (Filipino, Porto Rico, Cuba, Samoa, and Hawaii), which definitively illustrates Kipling’s poem titled “The White Man’s Burden”. We can see the contradictory facial expression between these two white carriers, who must suffer the ponderousness of the journey, and the people inside the burden, who appear to be very jubilant and partly to gloat over the carriers below them. This contrast also opposes to the conventional racism against non-white, non-Western, and non-Christian people. These rocks of the mountain are also carved with different words which are supposed to characterise the white-privilege class of British and American society in 19th century, such as “barbarism”, “ignorance”, “oppression”, “brutality”, ...

Rudyard Kipling’s poem was originally written for Queen Victoria but he later changed his mind and didn’t have it published until 1899. It was at this time that America

Blaise Pascal once said: “Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much”. The same could be said for harmful words. One word could change someone's entire day, whether that be kind or harmful is all up to the speaker. Words can hurt and they can repair, but they can never be forgotten. Words are powerful and can be used numerous different ways. Words can dictate how we are perceived, they can be used to persuade, they can be used to evoke emotion, logical sense and credibility as well as how a person’s daily life plays out.

I find it really interesting how Kipling did what many Indian-English writers never dare to do. He transmitted his views and beliefs through his work. Criticism was not something that prevented him from stopping, it helped him find the confidence to continue. You mentioned how he also found inspiration from the different places that he lived in throughout his life: England, India, and Africa. Which influenced many of today’s writers to write about their surroundings. You also mentioned his most famous work, Kim, which I had not really heard about. Though I can now see why many people were intrigued by its plot.

I like this quote because it’s something that my dad told me and won’t stop. Knowledge is power. This quote pretty much is self explanatory, but it means that knowledge is currency in the world, it's not a dollar, it’s not a peso, or a british pound. With information you can gain all these types of money but with money you can’t gain knowledge. Frederick Douglass exemplifies this idea. Frederick started as a slave, his mother a black woman and his father the slave owner. Frederick didn’t know anything when he was a slave and only succeeded to read due to Douglass tricking kids into teaching him new words, and then he was able to become one of the most respected abolitionists in U.S. history. With his new found skill of reading he can see all the evils of slavery clearer and how horrid it really is, and he now has the confidence to oppose his ruthless master Mr. Covey.

The White man’s Burden edifies readers who are not familiar to Kipling’s imperialistic ideology. The poem was written and sent to Theodore Roosevelt in 1898 when America

Rudyard Kipling justified imperialism by claiming that it was the white man’s god given duty to help the natives. Kipling said, “The silent,

Wheatley?s poetry been scrutinized for its authenticity, but it has been challenged by many that her work was not as crusading as it should have been in commenting on the inhumanity of slavery. The expectation for her work to have been a form of protest literature is simply not practical. Wheatley lived in an era when slavery was legal; African Americans were not educated, especially African American women; and she was being well cared for by the Wheatley family. Her life, while writing Poems on Various Subjects, was an enviable one for a slave

Last week Conor McGregor wrote, “All men are equals, it’s the ones who put in more hard work that are considered talented or special, if you do work hard you will reach the top and that's that”. People who have worked very hard to learn to need and use words effecting include Guy Montag, Frederick Douglass,Malcolm X, and Kurt Vonnegut.

1. According to Kipling, and in your own words, what was the "White Man's Burden?"

Rudyard Kipling’s novella,“The Man Who Would Be King”, is about two English men, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan, who are cons artists that live in India with the goal of becoming the kings of Kafiristan. The story is told through a narrator, an Englishman, that stumbles upon the two characters through a strange interaction at a train station. After meeting up with the narrator at his job, Dravot and Carnehan gather as much information as they can about Kafiristan and head off in disguise for their journey to becoming kings. There are many similarities regarding how and why the British Empire and Dravot and Carnehan came to imperialize these Indian countries. Throughout the whole novella, Kipling uses the story as a way to display

Kipling’s person experiences are constructed to leave a message of maturity for both audiences. Kipling has his poetry set in a parallel structure and left many of the lines open-ended for further interpretation. He guides the reader in the right direction of the mature thing to do, however, depending on where a person is at, the audience will take their own route with their personal mindset. Kipling is trying to convey the message that maturity is not age, but rather growing from situations and how a person handles them. He is trying to get this ideology through to his child so he can be a Man one day. Having this personal experience will also build ethos as a speaker to the audience.

Rudyard Kipling’s attitude towards the British Empire was significantly negative. The novella essentially expressed Kipling’s feelings towards British Imperialism and his overall frustration with the British Empire. However, there are several positive qualities of the Empire pointed out by Kipling several times throughout his novella. Despite his mixed feelings, he is ultimately dissatisfied with the British Empire, claiming that it is “the White Man’s Burden”. Kipling was a steadfast imperialist, living in a time of British domination and oppression. He shared similar outlooks with the natives, that the majority of them were oppressed by the government and the wealthy. The upper class was greedy and wanted working men to do all of the work for them so that they could reap the profits. Kipling conveys his attitude towards British Imperialism through parallelism and figurative language.

The poem makes clear Kipling's view of attitudes that allowed colonialism to proceed. Although a belief in the virtues of empire was widespread at the time, there were also many dissenters; the publication of the poem caused a flurry of arguments from both sides, most notably from Mark Twain and Henry James. Mark Twain asserted that Kipling wrote the poem to help persuade many doubting Americans to seize the Philippines, which seemed to be a fair point of view for that time period. In the New York Herald, October 15, 1900, Twain describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine-American War. He recognizes his transformation from being Pro- imperialist to Anti- imperialist. Many Anti-imperialists like Mark Twain acted on the popularity of the poem to attack the McKinley’s policies as too great a "burden" or

At the close of the 19th century Rudyard Kipling preserved the prevailing attitude of Britain’s intellectual elite in a poem - “The White Man’s Burden”. In his work Kipling confirms the hubris of a generation of Britons who were entirely convinced that they were culturally, rationally, and morally superior to the “new-caught…Half-devil and half-child” natives of the British colonies. This belief in the superiority of western values manifested in the flight of thousands of philanthropically minded Victorians across the British Empire. These emigrants consisted of a section of society driven to do their duty and fulfil the “national