Danny Deever - Critical Reaction

Critical Reaction

Danny Deever is often seen as one of Kipling's most powerful early works, and was greeted with acclaim when first published. David Masson, a professor of literature at the University of Edinburgh, is often reported (perhaps apocryphally) to have waved the magazine in which it appeared at his students, crying "Here's literature! Here's literature at last!". William Henley, the editor of the Scots Observer, is even said to have danced on his wooden leg when he first received the text.

It was later commented on by William Butler Yeats, who noted that " interests a critical audience today by the grotesque tragedy of Danny Deever". T. S. Eliot called the poem "technically (as well as in content) remarkable", holding it up as one of the best of Kipling's ballads. Both Yeats and Eliot were writing shortly after Kipling's death, in 1936 and 1941, when critical opinion of his poetry was at a low point; both, nonetheless, drew out Danny Deever for attention as a significant work.

Discussing that low critical opinion in a 1942 essay, George Orwell considered Danny Deever as an example of Kipling "at his worst, and also his most vital ... almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life". He felt the work was an example of what he described as "good bad poetry"; verse which is essentially vulgar, yet undeniably seductive and "a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man."