Kipling himself does not lighten Keating's task. He always referred to what he wrote as ''verse'' and would never allow others to call it ''poetry''. He saw that his talent lay in technical virtuosity and craftsmanship - lacking the visionary properties which, to the classical purist, were a vital part of a poet's job description.

Keating deals with this reticence by treating Kipling as a reluctant prophet shrinking from the honour of becoming a ''People's Laureate''.

He assiduously traces the origins of the roomy qualities of Kipling's style back to the early influences of Browning and Tennyson; he even explores the Yeatsian turn his poetry might have taken.

The strength of Keating's argument lies in some very able criticism with which he highlights Kipling's inexhaustible facility for using rhyme and metre to mirror anything, from the movement of monkeys swinging through the branches of The Jungle Book to the subtle moods in the characters he depicts in his first-person narrator poems.

Keating provides sharp analysis of the trenchant political satire often lurking behind the gummily innocuous nursery jingles; and even evidence of some seditious gallows humour between the lines of his army songs.

But one thing leads to another and before he knows it Keating has strayed into the territory of Kipling - The Man. The book rapidly becomes a Kipling apologia, protesting too much Kipling's love of natives and animals and his ''absolute religious tolerance'' (which stridently conflicts with his overt anti-Semitism), stressing that if Kipling was reactionary, well, so was everyone else at the time.

There is no doubt that Kipling achieved laudable results through his poetry. His Tommy Atkins drew much-needed attention to the sorry lot of the British soldier by attacking the fickle, fair-weather attitude of the public for whom he was a piece of dirt during unglamorous peacetime but a local hero after a victorious war: Oh it's Tommy this an' Tommy that, and 'Tommy, go away'; But it's 'Thank you, Mr Atkins', when the band begins to play Although Keating knows he can never de-jingo-ise Kipling, he successfully distinguishes the honourable side of Kipling's patriotic motivation from the caricature of the Blimpish war-mongerer that posterity has imposed upon him.

The last part of the book is dense with documentation about Kipling's constructive acts of patriotism during and between both world wars, which unquestionably rebound to his credit.

Is Kipling a great poet? Yeats and Eliot would never have been considered great had they allowed their morally repugnant views to intrude into their poetry and impair its worth. But Kipling's hectoring, didactic, moralistic intentions were so much a part of his poetic identity that it has been difficult for other elements in his work to transcend them.

It is also difficult to accept Kipling as a great poet because in most of his work words were merely a means to an end, a vehicle for expression.

He never used words to probe beneath the veneer of reality that overlaid the insecurity of the pre-war Zeitgeist ; the factor that made some of his contemporaries great artists.

This is a rather self-serving contribution to the But-is-it-Art? debate, and as an attempt to divest Kipling of his identity as cultural pariah living on the fringes of literature, a little far-fetched.