If— by Rudyard Kipling

Context: "If" ranks with Longfellow's "Psalm of Life" in being quotable; almost every line has become a familiar phrase. For many years graduating classes in America voted it their favorite poem. Developed through a long series of conditional clauses, the poem establishes the qualities that Kipling and his contemporaries considered essential for the type of man they admired: a man imperturbable, self-contained, and self-reliant, calm in both triumph and disaster; and, above all, capable of getting his job done. Such were the men who built the British Empire, and this was the sort of poem admired when poetry was unashamedly didactic.