Poem should have been left

I DON’T know what I think about Manchester University Students’ Union painting over Kipling’s poem “If” which the university had put up when redecorating the building.

They replaced it with Maya Angelou’s “Still I rise” on the grounds that Kipling “...stands for the opposite of liberation, empowerment, and human rights...” whereas Angelou’s work “better reflects the union’s values”, her being a “black poet and civil rights activist”.

I first met “If” when I had to learn it in my selective boys school 52 years ago. I rapidly came to feel it was rather odd, risible, and of another age - perhaps teachers too often teach what was important to their teachers. But years later I came by Kipling’s Collected Poems and read some of his short stories (before I read Just So Stories) and a much more ambiguous picture emerges.

I know George Orwell wrote: “Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.” But he then pointed out his service to literature (which saw him awarded a Nobel Prize).

Be that as it may, perhaps the MUSU executive might have considered the wider corpus of his work in its setting rather than seemingly simplistic second-hand judgements lacking historical perspective.

I don’t dispute his being a poet of empire with (now) offensive views and language, but he was also a mouthpiece for underclasses.

He stayed with Rhodes but gave tongue to common barrack-room soldiers. This explains the esteem my grandfather’s generation (he saw RAF service in India) had for him (read about or listen to “Danny Deever” on Youtube).

Now I don’t deny Angelou has a right to be on the walls of the Union, like the university’s vice chancellor Lemn Sissay, she takes poetry to and from places old dead white men don’t and didn’t.

But perhaps Kipling and other old dead white men are more ambiguous and ironic than we give them credit for.

Perhaps the university showed poor taste in its choice of poem, but I can’t help thinking the Union would have furthered education by leaving the poem there, supplementing it with some of his greater work, and adding Sissay and some less difficult writing.

The university has Jeanette Winterson, would they give up Dickens or Hardy?

If the students have been to the library or Blackwells and actually read Kipling, so their reaction is informed, I apologise and can only say I disagree with them. Old white teacher, Chorlton