RUDYARD KIPLING
Sassoon had long disliked what he saw as an outdated imperialistic bent in Kipling’s poetry, going so far as to argue with Rupert Brooke about it in the summer of 1914, when he dismissed it as “terribly tub-thumping stuff”. By the 1930s he was critical of Kipling’s calls for Britain to produce more ar- maments, and in his poem ‘Silver Jubilee Celebrations’ he satirised a speech to the Royal Society of St George where Kipling warned that Britain must “arm or perish”. He returns to the same theme in the second and third caricature of this sequence, where Kipling plays both bard and puppetmaster in the march to war.
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