If.
"If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you... yours is the earth and everything that's in it, and - which is more - you'll be a man, my son!" First American edition of Rudyard Kipling's If
If.
KIPLING, Rudyard.
Item Number: 120145
Garden City, New York: Doubleday Page, 1910.
First American edition of Kipling’s ever-relevant tribute to Leander Starr Jameson. Small octavo, original illustrated boards. In very good condition.
"If—" first appeared in the "Brother Square Toes" chapter of the book Rewards and Fairies, a collection of Kipling's poetry and short-story fiction, published in 1910. In his posthumously published autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), Kipling said that, in writing the poem, he was inspired by the character of Leander Starr Jameson, leader of the failed Jameson Raid against the Transvaal Republic to overthrow the Boer Government of Paul Kruger. The failure of that mercenary coup d'état aggravated the political tensions between Great Britain and the Boers, which led to the Second Boer War (1899–1902).As an evocation of Victorian-era stoicism—the "stiff upper lip" self-discipline, which popular culture rendered into a British national virtue and character trait, "If—" remains a cultural touchstone.
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