While two volumes of Kipling's poems are clearly labelled as 'Barrack-Room Ballads', identifying which poems should be grouped in this way can be complex. A third group of vernacular Army poems from the Boer War, titled 'Service Songs' and published in The Five Nations (1903), can be considered part of the Ballads, as can a number of other uncollected pieces. Kipling later returned to the theme in a group of poems collected in The Seven Seas under the same title.

The first poems were published in the Scots Observer in the first half of 1890, and collected in Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses in 1892. The series contains some of Kipling's best-known works, including the poems ' Gunga Din', ' Tommy', ' Mandalay', and ' Danny Deever', helping consolidate his early fame as a poet. The Barrack-Room Ballads are a series of songs and poems by Rudyard Kipling, dealing with the late-Victorian British Army and mostly written in a vernacular dialect. He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined.First (1892) edition of Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (publ.

Henry James said: “Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.” In 1907, at the age of 42, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the British Empire, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story his children’s books are classics of children’s literature, and one critic described his work as exhibiting “a versatile and luminous narrative gift”. Kipling’s works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including “The Man Who Would Be King” (1888). He was born in India, which inspired much of his work. Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Containing Departmental Ditties and Other Verses.

Kipling ballads