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Concept
Robert W. Service
Summary
Robert William Service (16 January 1874 – 11 September 1958) was a British-Canadian poet and writer, often called "the Bard of the Yukon". Born in Lancashire of Scottish descent, he was a bank clerk by trade, but spent long periods travelling in the west in the United States and Canada, often in poverty. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he was inspired by tales of the Klondike Gold Rush, and wrote two poems, "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", which showed remarkable authenticity from an author with no experience of the gold rush or mining, and enjoyed immediate popularity. Encouraged by this, he quickly wrote more poems on the same theme, which were published as Songs of a Sourdough (re-titled The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses in the U.S.), and achieved a massive sale. When his next collection, Ballads of a Cheechako, proved equally successful, Service could afford to travel widely and live a leisurely life, basing himself in Paris and the French Riviera.
Partly because of their popularity, and the speed with which he wrote them, his works were dismissed as doggerel by the critics, who tended to say the same of Rudyard Kipling, with whom Service was often compared. This did not worry Service, who was happy to classify his work as "verse, not poetry".
Robert William Service was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, the third of ten children. His father, also Robert Service, was a banker from Kilwinning, Scotland, who had been transferred to England. Service's second name, "William", was in honour of a rich uncle; after that uncle neglected to provide for him in his will, Service dropped the middle name.
When he was five, Service was sent to live in Kilwinning with his three maiden aunts and his paternal grandfather, the town's postmaster. There he is said to have composed his first verse, a grace, on his sixth birthday: At nine, Service re-joined his parents who had moved to Glasgow. He attended Glasgow's Hillhead High School.
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