You will pry "If" from my unapologetic hands on the twelfth of never. Yes he's a terrible colonialist.

Allowing for natural variation in the work to be pried, I think this is the relationship of most of the people I know to Kipling! I don't feel the need to argue otherwise in order to justify the importance of his work to me. The thing that confuses me about Orwell is that he doesn't even seem to be arguing that the terrible colonialism made for bad poetry. He just thinks the poetry is bad on its own time. And I don't understand his criteria.