when he was in school, "they had to recite Kipling's 'If—' every day, right after the Pledge of Allegiance: 'If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, / Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son! Pablo Neruda—like Kipling, a Nobel laureate—found a framed ornamental copy of the poem near the Duke of Alba's bedside in the Palacio de Liria. However, his view was not favourable, and he referred to it as "that pedestrian and sanctimonious poetry, precursor of the Reader's Digest, whose intellectual level seems to me no higher than that of the Duke of Alba's boots". In the BBC's 1996 nationwide poll, "If—" was voted the UK's favourite poem, gaining twice as many votes as the runner-up. Text See also "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley "The Man in the Arena" by Theodore Roosevelt "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" by Rudyard Kipling "Vitaï Lampada" by Henry Newbolt Agency (philosophy) References External links Reading of "If—" on Wikimedia Commons Authentic digital editions archive of "If—" Staging of "If—" as a comic strip If by Rudyard Kipling on YouTube 1910 poems Doubleday, Page & Company books Poetry by Rudyard Kipling 1890s poems Stoicism Victorian culture National symbols of the United Kingdom