Why do public figures keep citing that crappy Kipling poem?

"Kipling is a fuckin' literary goldmine!"

The dreck that is “If,” and why the Ron Blagojevishs of the world need a better poem

During his December 17 press conference, in which the current Illinois governor turned a three-minute statement of innocence into a something close to Vaudeville, Rod Blagojevich gave the nation a surprise poetry reading. Looking into the camera and at the faces of the press, he recited the first seven lines of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If,” apparently from memory.

In doing so, Blagojevich gave us the hoariest of poetic chestnuts, a poem famous not for its literary merits but more for the hoards of business execs and life coaches who trumpet it across this great country of ours.

In poetic terms, “If” represents what’s known around the literary world as a stinker. It’s a crap poem, an eye-rolling dud. It’s also one of the few poems that a large number Americans recognize. That Blagojevich felt it necessary and proper not only to cite “If” but to recite its opening from memory attests to the poem’s cultural power 113 years after it was written.

So how did Kipling’s clunker acquire so much cultural currency? And more importantly, aren’t there any better poems with which embattled public figures can shield themselves when facing spectacular business failures and federal indictments?

Those are groundhogs that were his eyebrows

Actually, Kipling’s ode to bootstrap-pulling isn’t the worst poem in the world, or even of its time. The Victorian era turned out its share of God-awful poems. Unfortunately, the Victorian era was also the last time our nation read poems on such a scale so as to give them an esteemed place within its culture. So when most people think of poetry, what comes to mind is probably something close to lines like the seven that Blagojevich recited from memory:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

Just before the turn of the 20th century, poems were a source of not only mass entertainment in America, they were also bite-sized instructions in morality. Take Kipling’s opening. There is little in the way of unique observation or description; there’s even less to ignite any kind of thought. Rather, what’s there is Kipling’s prescription for a successful life. It revolves around an If/Then construction—32 lines of more or less the same plodding rhythm, no less—only to be resolved in the final two:

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

A quick look at the poem—which insisted on forehead-slapping end rhymes and chugging along in that most popular wasteland of dull poetry, iambic pentameter —exhorts its reader (a man, naturally) by turns not to listen to anyone who may threaten to induce doubt but also to such fairly impossible actions as “force your heart and nerve and sinew / To serve your turn long after they are gone.”

Kipling was far from alone in writing this type of single-minded poetry. Here’s another popular poet of Kipling’s time, John Greenleaf Whittier, in “The Bartholdi Statue,”

The land, that, from the rule of kings,
In freeing us, itself made free,
Our Old World Sister, to us brings
Her sculptured Dream of Liberty . . . .

Sounds good, but what does this “in freeing us, itself made free” business really mean? Best not to look too closely.

Instead we are supposed to enjoy the poem’s vague sense of uplift, its catchy iambic backbeat and Whittier’s uncanny ability to rhyme “kings” with “brings.” And so goes the popular poetry of that age, which, incidentally, gave us W.E. Henley’s “Invictus.” It’s closing line, “I am the captain of my soul,” were Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh’s last words.

Just another "Invictus" fan

In general, this type of poem is what springs to mind when we think of poetry. The celebration of life, the da-dum da-dum da-dum heartbeat of each line, and of course the final satisfactory crash of end rhyme to signal the conclusion of the poem’s lone argument, usually, as in “If” and “Invictus,” the willful triumph of the individual over such nuisances as circumstance, laziness, and pretty much any other societal or personal annoyance keeping you from being the rich, successful man you ought to be.

But even Kipling himself later saw his poem for what it was—namely, a widely anthologized, empty-minded club with which to beat students about the head. In his autobiography, “Something of Myself,” published in 1937, the year after his death, Kipling copped to the poem’s greatest sin, its oversimplification of life, saying it “contained counsels of perfection most easy to give.”

“Schools, and places where they teach, took them for the suffering Young,” he wrote of those counsels, “which did me no good with the Young when I met them later.”

“If” has been translated into 27 languages and, as Kipling put it, “anthologised to weariness.” But is it any wonder that Blagojevich and his fellow walking egos of the world should keep Kipling’s 32 lines alive today? The poem contains everything politics and business require. Strong but necessarily vague language. An excuse to ignore dissent. And most importantly, a me-against-the-world individualism that reduces life to a singular view: Losers lose because they’re losers.

Blagoviche is just one type of person for whom “If” is the poetic Alpha and Omega.  In her essay “Vichy Washington,” Joan Didion reports that watching Henry Hyde’s performance during the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton had caused a director of the Independent Women’s Forum to recall “whole chunks” of “If.” The only business woman I’ve ever dated—who ran her region of a retail giant like Stalin in a tinkerbell skirt—loved quoting the poem, her favorite, to managers with excuses larger than their daily sales.

For the Type-A, Winner-Take-All, I-Will-Fight-These-Federal-Charges crusaders of our country—those captains of their very own souls—Kipling’s “If” will continue to be the end-all, be-all of poetry.

And that’s fine, I suppose. After all, it’s tough to rally the troops with “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or anything by, say, John Ashbery. But do the Soul Captains really need to keep reciting such a shitty poem?

Not at all. For our the public’s sake, not to mention poetry’s, here are three other poems that Blagojevich and his Kipling-loving crew might consider trotting out come press conference time.

Ben Jonson’s three-line poem “On Spies” seems a perfect fit for the governor whose performances on federal wiretaps (and to one-man audience of Jesse Jackson, apparently) is either the stuff of Shakespeare or The Sopranos. Plus, it takes little-to-no-time to memorize and has the end rhymes that announce its poemy-ness:

Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff,
Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff,
Stink and are thrown away. End fair enough.

Then there is Robert Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi,” which clocks in at 392 lines. The Governor probably won’t recite this one in its entirety; however, the opening lines in which the speaker, a Carmelite monk, is caught cruising the 15th century Italian equivalent of Sunset Strip could prove useful. Blagojevich could learn a thing or two from poor brother Lippo.

In the space of 40 lines, our good monk moves from the “It’s not what it looks like” defense:

What, ‘tis midnight, and you go the rounds
And here catch me at an ally’s end
Where sportive ladies leave their doors ajar ?
The Carmine’s my cloister: hunt it up

to the “I have powerful friends” defense:

Why, one sir, who is lodging with a friend
Three streets off—he’s a certain … howd’ye call?
Master—a … Cosimo of the Medici

to the “This is all your fault” defense:

He’s a Judas to a tittle, that man is!
Just such a face! Why, sir, you make amends.

before settling on what passed in the mid-1400’s for claiming exhaustion.

And if those two poems are, like Eliot’s Prufrock (whom Blagojevich could take a few “Do I dare?” cues from), too full of high sentence, there are hundreds more.

It’s too bad that our idea of poetry is tied to an uptight, overweight British chick. Because even after Queen Victoria’s death (in 1901) poets have been writing great poems, even a few podium-pounders that the Blagojevichs of the world would do well to use.

But if the our cultural sun set on poetry before the first World War, then there are still poems in which corrupt public figures can wrap themselves when the flag gets a little too constraining. In fact, it’s a mystery to me why, when cornered with one’s own recorded words, the public figure under fire doesn’t turn to this small jewel within the penultimate section of Walt Whitman’s ode to the ego, “Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)