This a overly dismissive. Nothing has changed in 2021, it’s just instead of calling cultural imperialism “the white man’s burden” we call it “protecting human rights” and “preserving democracy” overseas, so it sounds better to modern ears. The mindset hasn’t changed. Behave in a way that the West finds “barbaric,”, and all kinds of soft and hard power will be brought against you.

For example, Kipling wanted to end sati (widows burning to death) because it was against his “white man’s” values, today we would be just as against it snd do whatever we could to stop it (probably mostly with soft power) in the name of women’s rights.

Either way, the reduction of someone who lived a full and rich life, an enormously popular and Nobel Prize winning writer to “well, actually he was problematic” is not healthy.

The submission is about the poem If, not Rudyard Kipling or The White Man’s Burden, so what is the relevance of that poem to “If”?

Whether he’s a poet or not is simply a matter of semantics, and also not relevant to the poem “If”. There’s also this quote in the link you provided:

> there appeared in one of our magazines a poem by Rudyard Kipling, the greatest poet of England at this time

Probably by your definition of Englightened, but not for many others.

Oof!