I think that the suggestion that "... by todays standards it would probably be considered to be quite badly written", if referring to Kiling's prose anyway, is a bit wide of the mark.

it were true it would just reflect badly on "today's standards", but I think most critics would rate Kipling's prose style very highly even today.

The whole question of the relation between "verse" and poetry" is a convoluted one. Personally I think that the way that the terms ever have been confused the way they have has been a seriously damaging mistake.

I prefer to see it this way: there is prose, of various sorts, and there is verse of various sorts, and they overlap. Whether you call certain types of writing a kind of free verse or a kind of prose is a purely arbitrary distinction.

Poetry is what you get when the language and the thought attain a certain level of power, and it can happen in prose or in verse.

And Kipling's prose and verse does attain that level not infrequently.

All this has nothing to do with the vexed question of Kipling's views about all kinds of other things.