Edward Richard Buxton Shanks (1892 – 1953) was an English writer, known as a war poet of World War I, then as an academic and journalist, and literary critic and biographer. He also wrote some science fiction.
He was later a literary reviewer, working for the London Mercury and for a short while a lecturer at the University of Liverpool. He then wrote for the Evening Standard, to 1935.
Works
Songs (1915) poems
Hilaire Belloc, the man and his work (1916) with C. Creighton Mandell
The Queen of China (1919) poems
The People of the Ruins (1920) novel
The Island of Youth (1921) poems
Poems 1912-1932 (1933)
Old King Cole (1936) novel
Edgar Allan Poe (1937)
Queer Street (1938)
Rudyard Kipling - A Study in Literature and Political Ideas (1940)
EdwardShanks sets out to trace the origin and growth of that influence and to define it; moreover, being himself a critic and poet of considerable standing, he is able to show us the actual mechanism whereby Kipling made that influence felt.
Shanks emphasizes the importance of remembering that Kipling (like Dickens) spent his early years in the routine practice of journalism, observing that "all his work was in one sense reporting on a grand scale".
Shanks accords to Kipling's poem "Boots" the same high ranking that I have always thought it deserved, describing it as 'A feat of technical virtuosity which even Kipling, virtuoso as he was in the handling of rhythms, never surpassed.
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