Barrack Room Ballads and Departmental Ditties and Other Verses.

Chicago, IL Rand McNally & Company. Hardcover Very Good: shows moderate wear to the extremities; mild rubbing;a couple of small soil spots at the rear panel and some darkening at the backstrip (the titles thereon are rendered less bright than when new, but remain legible); the former owner's rather attractive bookplate affixed to the front pastedown endpaper and his name inscribed at the front free endpaper. The Binding remains square and secure; the text is clean. Despite a number of flaws, remains a clean, sturdy, presentable copy. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 8vo. 278pp. Decorated Endpapers; Attractive crimson cloth over boards with gilt floral designs at the front panel; gilt titles at front panel and backstrip. Hardback: No DJ 'as issued'. The Barrack-Room Ballads, and Other Verses are a set of martial songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling originally published in two parts: the first set in 1892, the second in 1896. Many have become classic military ditties and are still well known, particularly "Gunga Din", "Tommy" and "Danny Deever". T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Kipling for his 1941 anthology of Kipling's verse, writes that many writers have written verse without writing poetry, but that Kipling was unusual in that he did write poetry without setting out to do so. In Eliot's view, this makes Kipling a 'ballad-writer', and that was already, he thought, more difficult in 1941 than in Kipling's time, as people no longer had the music hall to inspire them. Eliot thought Kipling's ballads unusual, also, in that Kipling had been careful to make it possible to absorb each ballad's message on a single hearing. But, wrote Eliot, Kipling had more to offer than that: he had "a consummate gift of word, phrase, and rhythm", never repeated himself, and used short, simple stanzas and rhyming schemes. What is more..."The variety of form which Kipling manages to devise for his ballads is remarkable: each is distinct, and perfectly fitted to the content and the mood which the poem has to convey. Nor is the versification too regular..."