The idea of this selection from Rudyard Kipling's many poems is to contrast the familiar with the unfamiliar: the list includes 26 of the first kind, and 74 of the second. Any collection will have those first 26; no other collection will have all 74 of the other kind – probably not more than one or two, if any. They come from many different sources, a few of them unpublished, none of them ever reprinted by Kipling himself. They have rested, unvisited, in inaccessible Indian newspapers, in manuscript, in the files of long-dead magazines.

The poems both old and new are arranged in chronological order; the range is from 1882 to 1935. The only requirement for inclusion among the “old” poems is that they be familiar. The uncollected poems have been chosen to be, one hopes, interesting; they are certainly varied.

The very familiar poems are a source of well-known quotations: “You’re a better man than I am”; “the White Man’s burden,” “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs”; “the female of the species is more deadly than the male.” That was one of Kipling’s undeniable gifts – the gift for the striking phrase, or, as he once put it, the power to find the “necessary word.” Such poems run the danger of becoming over-familiar, so that it is no longer possible to take them in.