The whole story …

… Triumph and Disaster: The Tragic Hubris of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If—’ | by Christopher Benfey | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

And yet, the Kipling case isn’t so simple. By a serendipity presumably unnoticed by the students, in Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, young Maya “enjoyed and respected Kipling,” singling out “If—” for praise. In fact, “Still I Rise” appears to be modeled in part on Kipling’s don’t-back-down poem. “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies,” Angelou writes defiantly, “But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” Perhaps Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist thinker and translator of the poem, put the complex appeal of “If—” best. “Kipling’s morality is imperialist only to the extent that it is closely linked to a specific historical reality,” Gramsci wrote from one of Mussolini’s prisons, “but there are lessons in the poem for any social group struggling for political power.”

The headline seems misleading.