Barrack-Room Ballads is a compilation of Rudyard Kipling's songs and
poems that predominantly uses a local dialect and focuses on the late
Victorian British Army. The collection contains some of Kipling's most
well-known poems, including "Gunga Din," "Tommy," "Mandalay," and "Danny
Deever," which helped him gain early recognition as a poet. The first
poems were published in the Scots Observer during the first half of
1890, and a compilation of them, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses
was published in 1892. Later, Kipling brought it up again in a book of
poetry named The Seven Seas. Ballads can be considered to be a subset of
The Five Nations (1903), which also contained a number of extra
uncollected poems and the third group of Boer War vernacular Army poetry
titled "Service Songs.'' The main collection of Kipling's Ballads was
published in the 1890s, in two volumes. The third group of poems,
published in 1903, continued the theme of military vernacular ballads.
The Ballads were first collected in one volume by Charles Carrington in
1973. Many of Kipling's short stories began with a little poem that was
frequently referred to as a "Barrack-Room Ballad."