Rudyard Kipling, the unrivalled poet laureate of the common man, has undoubtedly augmented the language with his fragmented phrases of diverse verse. His poems offer a curiously interesting and much contested amaIgum of the West and the East. Described as the greatest democratic English poet, he versified emotions which the average man instantly recognises with the energy and vividness of a man of genius. This edition of the complete verse bears weighty testimony of that acclaim. Over 700 pages of Gunga Din and Danny Deever, Judy O'Grady and the Colonel's Lady, in the company of a wealth of other, less familiar creations, all of them sharing a similar resonance that made Rudyard Kipling the literary lion of the Empire. The Foreword to this edition clearly demonstrates that Rudyard Kipling could seek no more convinced and sympathetic an advocate than Fluskin Bond.