What was unexpected was that she singled out Kipling’s Barrack Room Ballads for special praise - perhaps this was because she was given the poems as a Christmas present.
Her actual words about the poems surprised me too:
“They are capital — full of virile strength and life. They thrill and pulsate and burn, they carry you along in their rush and swing, till you forget your own petty interests and cares, and burst out into a broader soul-world and gain a much clearer realization of all the myriad forms of life that are beating around your own little one. And this is good for a person even if one does slip back afterwards into the narrow bounds of one’s own life. We can never be quite so narrow again.”
From The Complete Journals of L. M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1900-1911
I certainly know what it is like to be thrilled and taken out of myself and swept into another, wider, world by certain poems, Rudyard Kipling’s in particular, but the Barrack Room Ballads are not among them. They have on the whole a negative effect.
This enthusiasm was so surprising that I went to Project Gutenberg to refresh my memory of the Ballads in the hope of understanding why L. M. Montgomery felt this way about them.
