Yes, that is the trouble, isn't it? I've been working hard to forget that stupid Jane poem, but you're right, you can't really escape reading it.
I'm sure they were semi-autobiographical; in his memoirs he writes so much about "The Daemon," and is so clearly able to differentiate between works where his Daemon was with him (Kim, the Puck books) and those where it wasn't (The Light That Failed, The Story of the Gadsbys.) Somewhere, I think maybe in a letter to Rider Haggard, he says, "we are only telephone wires."
There's "Dayspring Mishandled," too, in which Manallace gets in some way taken over by Chaucer's creative Daemon, writes his brilliant Chaucer pastiche, and then goes back to churning out potboilers.
I'd better stop before I derail this thread any further. I just love talking about Kipling.
Re: Kipling reflections OT
I'm sure they were semi-autobiographical; in his memoirs he writes so much about "The Daemon," and is so clearly able to differentiate between works where his Daemon was with him (Kim, the Puck books) and those where it wasn't (The Light That Failed, The Story of the Gadsbys.) Somewhere, I think maybe in a letter to Rider Haggard, he says, "we are only telephone wires."
There's "Dayspring Mishandled," too, in which Manallace gets in some way taken over by Chaucer's creative Daemon, writes his brilliant Chaucer pastiche, and then goes back to churning out potboilers.
I'd better stop before I derail this thread any further. I just love talking about Kipling.
--Katy