[TalBlack]

Could Shakespeare?

Anyone who understood the human heart as well as Shakespeare did must infallibly know the future...and show it when he picks up his pen. Kipling was more deliberately a political commentator than The Bard was.

[lentulusgracchus]

Kipling nearly became a U.S. citizen .... he was living in Brattleboro in 1894, but some half-assed diplomatic rumpus between the U.S. and Britain led to some things being said, and then some other things being said, and he went home to England. His writing changed, btw, it is said, and he was never quite the same again. Somewhat dispirited, we are told, as if he'd been deflected from his life's trajectory.

He'd have made a hell of an addition to New England letters.