Service, Robert William

(1874-1958)

   Known as the "Canadian Kipling," he was born into a Scottish family from Preston, England. He was educated in Glasgow, emigrated to Canada in 1895 to work for the Canadian Bank of Commerce, and ended up in the Yukon. "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" made him a fortune. These and other poems were published in Toronto as Songs of a Sourdough and in New York as The Spell of the Yukon (1907). Ballads of a Cheechako appeared in 1909. In 1912, he reported on the Balkan war for the Toronto Star. During World War I he served with the American ambulance unit and with Canadian army intelligence. After World War II, during which he lived in America, he moved to Brittany, where he died. He remained a British citizen and was honored on a Canadian postage stamp in 1976. Some of his poetry publications: Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man, 1916. Ballads of a Bohemian, 1921. Bar-Room Ballads, 1940. Rhymes for My Rags, 1956. Some of his other poems: "Little Moccasins," "The Call of the Wild," "The Law of the Yukon," "The Lure of Little Voices."

   Sources: Canadian Poetry in English. Bliss Carman, Lorne Pierce and V.B. Rhodenize, eds. Ryerson Press, rev. and enl. ed., 1954. Canadian Poets. John W. Garvin, ed. McClelland, Goodchild and Stewart, 1916. Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite DVD, 2006. Shrieks at Midnight: Macabre Poems, Eerie and Humorous. Sara Brewton and John E. Brewton, eds. Thomas Y. Crowell, 1969. The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Complete Poems of Robert Service. Dodd, Mead and Company, 1940. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia).