[1] A Choice of Kipling's Verse rapidly attracted critical attention, both supportive and hostile, on both sides of the Atlantic.
[2] George Orwell took the opportunity to write an extended political essay, which included his own appraisal of Kipling as man and poet.
[4][5]: 109 A pseudonymous reviewer in New English Weekly wrote, "Mr. Eliot offers an important defense of Kipling's imperialism".
[6][5]: 109 English poet Norman Nicholson asserted his right as one of the presumed intended audience to comment, and gave his own, somewhat equivocal, opinion on Kipling.
[8] Louise Bogan wrote, "It is [...] strange to see [Eliot] bending the subtle resources of his intelligence in a hopeless cause" (i.e. that of rehabilitating Kipling).
[9] William Rose Benét wrote (ambiguously), "[Eliot] is not a genius, like Kipling, but his is a subtle and interesting mind".
... you can read through the bulky Inclusive Edition of his verse, on which Mr. Eliot's selection is based, and be neither wearied, in part because you will not have been involved, nor uninterested, because Kipling was a man of great gifts...but when you have done you will be less inclined to condemn than to pity.W.
H. Auden wrote a two-page review for The New Republic (in copyright, and not readable online),[12] which Mildred Martin summarized as "Little on Eliot, chiefly in praise of Kipling".
The critical tools which Eliot was accustomed to use did not seem to work.16-17 He said that "most of us" (i.e. poets) were interested in form for its own sake, and with musical structure in poetry, leaving any deeper meaning to emerge from a lower level; in contrast to Kipling, whose poems were designed to elicit the same response from all readers.18 Eliot defended himself against the hypothetical charge that he had been briefed in the cause of some hopelessly second-rate writer.
Nevertheless, Eliot did not wish to overstress the likeness, and recognised the differences.26 Kipling thought his verse and prose as both being for a public purpose.
Eliot warned against taking Kipling out of his time, and against exaggerating the importance of a particular piece or phrase which a reader might dislike.
He was exasperated both by sentimentalism and by depreciation and neglect.26-27 Eliot attributed Kipling's development to the time he had spent in India; on travel and in America; and finally settled in Sussex.
Kipling did not write about Sussex because he had run out of foreign and imperial material or because the public demand for it had passed, nor because he was a chameleon who took his colour from his surroundings.
He was "discovering and reclaiming a lost inheritance".32-33 The most important thing in Kipling's Sussex stories was his vision of "the people of the soil"; not in a Christian but more in a pagan sense, not as a programme for agrarian reform, but as a counterbalance to materialism and industrialism.
Eliot noted the contrast in "The Wish House" (a short story in the 1926 collection Debits and Credits) between its supernatural elements and its sordid realism; he found both it and its two accompanying poems "hard and obscure".
He must have known that his own fame and reputation would get in the way of all but a few people understanding his late parables and the skill with which they were constructed; both in his time and afterwards.33-34 Kipling wrote "verse" rather than "poetry" (two terms which Eliot acknowledged he was using loosely).