Traditional Culture

What Kipling’s Poem ‘If’ Can Teach Boys About Manhood

A Victorian-era poem offers surprisingly practical lessons on what it means to become a man.
Google LogoMark Us Preferred on Google
What Kipling’s Poem ‘If’ Can Teach Boys About Manhood
Boys benefit from strong examples of responsible adulthood from parents and mentors. Maskot/Getty Images
Walker Larson
|Updated:
0:00

Raising boys to be men is one of the great challenges of our time. Traditional notions of masculinity have been seriously obscured in recent decades, giving rise to a false dilemma of either toxic masculinity or mere effeminacy. Neither one, of course, is true masculinity. And directing boys toward these false solutions hurts both them and society.

How do we recover a proper understanding of masculinity and manhood, one that avoids both of the extremes described above? One place to look is in classic literature.

Google LogoMark Us Preferred on Google
Walker Larson
Walker Larson
Author
Before becoming a freelance journalist and culture writer, Walker Larson taught literature and history at a private academy in Wisconsin, where he resides with his wife and daughter. He holds a master’s in English literature and language, and his writing has appeared in The Hemingway Review, Intellectual Takeout, and his Substack, The Hazelnut. He is also the author of two novels, “Hologram” and “Song of Spheres.”