The following comes from "The Mentor" a magazine of literature and authors. The author is Howard W. Cook and the issue was April 1 1919. A gravure of Robert Service was also included in this issue and is shown at the bottom of this web page. Of interest is the myth that Service traveled north for gold and not as a result of a job relocation.
Makers of Modern American Poetry
(men)
Robert Service
With "The Songs of a Soughdough" and The Ballads of a Cheechako," Robert Service established his name and fame as one of the most popular of modern American poets. While we in the States have found little time to delve into the brand of poetry that Canada, as a country, is producing, is producing, Masters, Bynner, nor any of our own United States poets, have found more favor with a larger audience than has Service.
An adventurer in the far north, lured by the promises of a gold fortune in the Yukon, like Balboa of old, he found a greater thing than that for which he sought. For here came the inspiration which resulted in such famous lines as these first stanzas fro "The Spell of the Yukon".
I wanted the gold, and I sought it,
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy - I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it -
Came out with a fortune last fall, -
Yet somehow life's not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn't all.
No! There's the land. (Have you seen it?)
It's the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it's a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there's some as would trade it
For no land on earth --and I'm one.
Within Service there was a desire that could be quelled to express the various scenes and adventures through which he was living, and so he gave us his poems of real men - "red blooded men," who talk in a vigorous tongue, whose primal instincts and passions spur them to labor, to dream, to achieve, to stand against defeat - in fact, human men. These are the men of "The Spell of the Yukon."
Service, an ardent motor enthusiast, enlisted as an ambulance driver early in the war. Stories of the bravery of his exploits cannot be given here, but he has faced the shell- stormed road with his loads of wounded: he has lived the things he writes, and just as he has analyzed the Yukon miner, so has he interpreted the struggles of the soldier of today.
The war stories that Robert Service tells in "Rhymes of a Red Cross Man" are among the most picturesque poems that have been produced as a result of the World War. The same vivid stroke that splashed the pages of his Yukon poems with life and adventure is again evidenced , and with even stronger amount of feeling than in his earlier work.
Robert Service was born in Preston, England, on January 16,, 1874, the son of Robert Service, manager of Preston Bank, and Emily Parker of Preston. He was educated at Hillhead Public School, Glasgow, and afterwards served an apprenticeship with the Commercial Bank of Scotland in the same city.
Service emigrated to Canada and settled on Vancouver Island, where he engaged in farming. He gave up this occupation for an explorer's life, traveling up and down the Pacific Coast, experiencing many hardships.
Eight years in the Yukon resulted in his metamorphosis from a bank employee to one of most important present-day poets.
His books include "Songs of '98" ; "Rhymes of a Rolling Stone"; "The Pretender"; and "Rhymes of a Red Cross Man".
Later in this issue the Mentor had a piece entitled "Soldier Poets". Here Service was mentioned along with Joyce Kilmer, Alan Seeger, Charles Devine, John McCrae and Jesse Edgar Middleton. It describes Services contributions as:
While "The Songs of a Sourdough" and "The Ballads of a Cheechako" established the just fame of Robert Service as a poet, he has done the best of his writing so far in "The Rhymes of a Red Cross Man." As an ambulance driver across the shell-torn fields of Flanders he too saw and lived and felt the things that he has set down so well in this book. And in the concluding stanza of "Young Fellow My Lad," Service presents in his own best style the spiritual side of those words, "Carry on":
"So you'll live, you'll live, Young Fellow My Lad,
In the gleam of the evening star,
In the wood-note wild and the laugh of the child,
In all sweet things that are.
And you'll never die, my wonderful boy,
While life is noble and true;
For all our beauty and hope and joy
We will owe to our lads like you."
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