Who is he, what happened to him, and why learn about him?
History is useful in many ways.
One is to remember what happened to Rudyard Kipling.
Education is learning about things like history and help us develop awareness and an opinion that may inform us in the proper use of impressions.
Rudyard Kipling is remembered for his fame not what happened to him. His tragic life is a reminder of the ups and downs in life and how difficult it is to navigate tragedy in any measure.
“If” is just one of the tools that can still help us cope, this poem is still quite famous.
It may also be of some note that Kipling was scarred in childhood by a nasty couple that ran a boarding school.
And he was the youngest man to win the Nobel Prize for literature, but due to the war, his son was killed and his daughter was lost to a disease. His sole surviving child, got married but never had a child. He never really recovered from the stress in his life. He was not well received after being so famous in his early life. As his mental anguish mounted, his latter years left him less received and more prone to be dismissed by the public opinion.
But History marks the changes that have occurred over the years.
Racism, poverty and disease have all improved greatly in the intervening years.
Check out Wikipedia-Rudyard Kipling for a more detailed account.