Triumph and Disaster: The Tragic Hubris of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If—’ | by Christopher Benfey | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books

Triumph and Disaster: The Tragic Hubris of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If—’ | by Christopher Benfey | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books: For these next two weeks, the best tennis players in the world will enter Wimbledon’s fabled Center Court under two lines of poetry inscribed in capital letters above the tunnel that leads from the locker room: “IF YOU CAN MEET WITH TRIUMPH AND DISASTER / AND TREAT THOSE TWO IMPOSTORS JUST THE SAME…” The passage is from Rudyard Kipling’s “If—,” once voted Britain’s most popular poem. It might surprise the poem’s many enthusiasts to learn that Kipling, who lived for several years in Vermont and built himself a tennis court there (reputedly the first in the state), originally used “If—” as the epilogue to a story about George Washington and his resistance to public opinion. Today, it is Kipling himself who often faces the public’s wrath.