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If— (1895) is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, and was first published in the Brother Square Toes chapter of Rewards and Fairies, Kipling's 1910 collection of short stories and poems. It is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism and the "stiff upper lip" that popular culture has made into a traditional British virtue. Its status is both confirmed by the widespread popularity it still draws amongst Britons, and the number of parodies it has inspired.

According to Kipling, in his autobiography Something of Myself, the poem was inspired by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, who in 1895 led an ill-fated raid by British forces against the Boers in South Africa. This defeat increased the tensions that ultimately led to the Second Boer War. The British press, however, portrayed Jameson as a hero in the middle of the disaster, and the actual defeat as a British victory.

If you can keep your head when all about you
⁠Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
⁠But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
⁠Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
⁠And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

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CURRENT COLLABORATIONS

The current Community collaboration is collecting texts related to The Sikh Religion Recent collaborations: Eminent Women Series, Edward VII of the United Kingdom, Henry David Thoreau, WikiProject NARA, Tenth Anniversary Contest

The current Proofread of the Month is Mr. Punch's history of the Great War  (1919) by Charles Larcom Graves. Recent collaborations: The war and the future, Weird Tales Volume 31 Issue 2, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1831 edition), Natural History, Fishes, Natural History, Reptiles, The Sikhs, Wuthering Heights (1st edition), Volume 1, The Lives of the Poets-Laureate, Siberia and the Exile System, A Motor-Flight Through France, Modern Poets and Poetry of Spain, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Cyclopedia of Painting, Cras credemus: A Treatise on the Cultivation of the Potato

The current Maintenance of the Month task is Work index revision Recent collaborations: Orphans, Proposed policies and guidelines, Author page connection with Wikidata items, Help page improvement, Undated works

NEW TEXTS

Some Account of the Science of Botany (1827)

by John Frost

Dr. Andrew Ure: a slight sketch (1876)

by Anonymous/ William Beattie

America Fallen! (1915)

by John Bernard Walker

Electra (1896)

by Euripides, translated by Arthur Sanders Way

Democracy in America (v. 1) (1835)

by Alexis de Tocqueville, translated by Henry Reeve

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions Resignation Letter (2018)

by Jeff Sessions

Heroic Airmen Are Key To Victory (1918)

by Herbert George Wells

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