Editor's Introduction

Even the estimated 68 percent of you who read jml online may want to buy this issue. It contains a collector's item—the first publication ever of E. M. Forster's 1909 lecture on Kipling's poetry. Rukun Advani has referred to this historic document as "one of the most important (and certainly the most detailed) critical essays" Forster "ever wrote" (187). We present it here because Michael Lackey, who painstakingly transcribed the handwritten copy of the lecture housed in the library of King's College Cambridge and obtained permission to publish it, decided that jml was the best place to showcase "Kipling's Poems," almost 100 years after Forster wrote it.

In his brief introduction to the lecture, Lackey contrasts Forster's democratic politics and modernist aesthetics to Kipling's "authoritarian stock-in-trade." He points out the masterful way Forster deploys rhetoric to subtly undermine a writer whom not only the British public but the world at large had long revered (Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907). In his reading of Forster's Kipling lecture, Jesse Matz also begins with politics—specifically the question of whether homosexuality undermines or reinforces colonialism—only to thread his politics through a rhetorical needle. Concluding that empirical evidence about Forster cuts both ways (his love for Syed Ross Masood may have inspired his anti-colonial A Passage to India, but his reference to his servant-lover Kanaya as "a slave, without rights" suggests a less progressive view), Matz nonetheless discovers in Forster's writing—especially in this newly-discovered lecture on Kipling's poetry—a rhetorical and theoretical link between homosexuality and anti-colonialism.

If, as it appears, the conversation between Forster and Kipling pits one generation against the next, delineating competing ideologies, politics, and aesthetics, K. Narayan Chandran's article on T. S. Eliot's "To the Indians who Died in Africa" and Daniel Hannah's exploration of three contemporary British novelists' "conversations" with Henry James confound any attempt to construct a tidy spreadsheet for these configurations. Near-contemporaries and equally-celebrated modernists, Eliot and Forster were politically poles apart. Although Eliot famously declared himself "classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion," it is only in his occasional verse that his imperialist biases manifest themselves in his poetry. Chandran's careful reading of Eliot's 1943 poem "To the Indians who Died in Africa" shows that it has much more in common with Kipling's "Hymn Before Action" (1896), a celebration of imperial virtues written on the eve of the Boer War, than it does with Forster's essay of the same name (1912), an explication of what Forster saw as the true meaning of dharma, written to refute Kipling in the face of an impending World War I. And while James is Kipling's older contemporary, they by no means occupy the same sexual register. Indeed, as Daniel Hannah shows, the elusive James, as tracked (or at least imagined) by Colm Tóibín, David Lodge, and Alan Hollinghurst, is more at home in contemporary queer subculture and its fictions than he ever could have been in an England, or America, in which Kipling—or Eliot, for that matter—would have felt comfortable.

Further blurring what we might like to be the simple binaries of 19th versus 20th century, emotion versus knowledge, Romantic versus modernist, Susan M. Miller meticulously reads several familiar poems by Thomas Hardy to demonstrate that he produces "lyric" emotion through a kind of intellectual "abstraction." This seeming oxymoron demonstrably works. Hardy was perhaps ideally situated to create what Miller calls an "impersonal lyric." He was old enough to "borrow a Wordsworthian model" for the relationship between experience and feeling, but young enough to have suffered, with the rest of the modernist generation, the evacuation of meaning and sense of numbness brought about by World War I.

T. S. Eliot reappears in Joshua Schuster's article, which also supports this issue's interest in conversation. This time the conversation is between the disciplines of poetry and anthropology. Critics have recently begun attending to this conversation, Schuster says, but most...