Barrack Room Ballads and Ditties.

New York, NY Henry Altemus , 1899. Hardcover Good+: shows moderate wear to the extremities, where the cloth over boards has worn through to the underlying board at three corner tips and at the heel of the backstrip; mild rubbing; faint but pervasive soiling. Binding square and secure, but only because the front hinge has been reinforced with binders glue; text clean. Despite a number of flaws, remains a sturdy, presentable copy. NOT a Remainder, Book-Club, or Ex-Library. 16mo. 247pp. Decorated Endpapers; Attractive green and gilt floral designs at the panels and backstrip; gilt titles at front panel and backstrip. Frontispiece portrait of the author. 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,[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] 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..."—T.S. Eliot