Robert William Service
Robert William Service (January 16, 1874 – September 11, 1958). Known as “The Bard of the Yukon” prolific author, Robert William Service, spoke of his work as “Verse, not poetry ... I never wrote to please anyone but myself; it just happened. I belonged to the simple folks whom I liked to please.”
He was born in Preston, Lancashire, England, in 1874, attended the University of Glasgow, and went on to travel the world as a cook, clerk, hobo, correspondent author and poet.
He emigrated to Canada in 1894 and spent eight years in the Yukon where he wrote his best known poems The Shooting of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee.
Service described writing in his Yukon cabin; "I used to write on the coarse rolls of paper used by paper-hangers, pinning them on the wall and printing my verses in big charcoal letters. Then I would pace back and forth before them, repeating them, trying to make them perfect. I wanted to make them appeal to the eye as well as to the ear. I tried to avoid any literal quality."
“I took the woodland trail, my mind seething with excitement and a strange ecstasy... verse after verse developed with scarce a check ... and when I rolled happily into bed, my ballad was cinched. Next day, with scarcely any effort of memory I put it on paper."
In 1912 he left Yukon to become a news correspondent during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. During the first World War he was a stretcher bearer and driver with the Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross in France. He married in Paris, returned to North America during WWII where he and his wife lived in Hollywood, California and Vancouver, British Columbia. Service and his wife returned to France after WWII and lived there until his death in 1958.
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