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(Meant to post this a while ago -- it's been sitting at the bottom of my drafts file for a couple months.)
At first glance, Robert Service sounds like the love-child* of Jack London and a very young Rudyard Kipling. By his second collection, there also looks to be influence from John Masefield (who published his first collection just a few years before Service), particularly in the play of meters. Service never does learn Kipling's control over the sound resources of poetry, but he knows what he wants his rhythms to do, and generally gets them to do it. And from the start, he had London's and Masefield's cast of grimness beneath a light tone.
Which is a tonal mixture I'm quite fond of, when done well. Service's work is uneven, but at his best he does it quite well indeed.
If a contemporary anthology has anything by Service in it, short odds are it's either "The Shooting of Dan MaGrew" or "The Cremation of Sam McGee." Significantly, they're both from his first, and by far best-selling, collection -- written when he was still scribbling verses for his own pleasure while running a branch bank in Dawson, Yukon territory, without thought of publication. (He didn't submit them for publication, either -- he'd sent off to Toronto to have couple dozen copies printed up to give to friends, and got back a contract instead.) Also significantly, they're among the most lighthearted -- "Cremation" is the only outright fantasy, in a tall-tale manner, in the collection. Though he remains fond, throughout his early career, for tales with twist endings.
This lack of diversity in how Service is represented short-sells his gift at conveying the beauty and lure of the wilderness. See, for example, the subject line (the speaker is a dying camp fire). More, he is obsessed with people who are drawn to extreme environments -- by love, by necessity, by not fitting into the constraints of normative society. It's here, though, that he gets particularly uneven, as he tends to assume his characters instead of depicting them. His extreme environments, though, are not just the Yukon frontier, but also the trenches of the Great War and the expat community of bohemian Paris.
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man stands out in this regard, as his depiction of the Western Front circa 1916 is compounded by ambivalence towards what makes the environment extreme (war's horrors) and the demands of patriotism. As such, it plays interestingly off Sassoon's war poetry, not to mention Whitman's Civil War poems. It's his fifth collection, however, that's particularly interesting -- Ballads of a Bohemian is a fictionalized account of Paris in 1914 though the first year of the Great War, as shown through the poems and journal entries of an English-speaking expat. As such, it amounts to a short novel in verse + prose. The contrast here is with the attitudes and society as depicted in, say, Collette. I've generally ignored the expat writers of intra-War Paris, but now I want to follow up for more comparison.
His racism is about what you'd expect for the time. More grating to me is the casual, unexamined misogyny of his POVs, as it's harder to tell how much Service agrees with it. It is probably accurate for the characters and times and places, but still. Fair warning.
Books read: Songs of a Sourdough/The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses (1907, original/American title), Ballads of a Cheechako (1909), Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916), Ballads of a Bohemian (1921)
Not read: The Shooting of Dan McGrew, a novelization by one Marvin Hill Dana. I'm more than a little afraid to peek at it, actually.
* Though not an unholyOMT one.
---L.
At first glance, Robert Service sounds like the love-child* of Jack London and a very young Rudyard Kipling. By his second collection, there also looks to be influence from John Masefield (who published his first collection just a few years before Service), particularly in the play of meters. Service never does learn Kipling's control over the sound resources of poetry, but he knows what he wants his rhythms to do, and generally gets them to do it. And from the start, he had London's and Masefield's cast of grimness beneath a light tone.
Which is a tonal mixture I'm quite fond of, when done well. Service's work is uneven, but at his best he does it quite well indeed.
If a contemporary anthology has anything by Service in it, short odds are it's either "The Shooting of Dan MaGrew" or "The Cremation of Sam McGee." Significantly, they're both from his first, and by far best-selling, collection -- written when he was still scribbling verses for his own pleasure while running a branch bank in Dawson, Yukon territory, without thought of publication. (He didn't submit them for publication, either -- he'd sent off to Toronto to have couple dozen copies printed up to give to friends, and got back a contract instead.) Also significantly, they're among the most lighthearted -- "Cremation" is the only outright fantasy, in a tall-tale manner, in the collection. Though he remains fond, throughout his early career, for tales with twist endings.
This lack of diversity in how Service is represented short-sells his gift at conveying the beauty and lure of the wilderness. See, for example, the subject line (the speaker is a dying camp fire). More, he is obsessed with people who are drawn to extreme environments -- by love, by necessity, by not fitting into the constraints of normative society. It's here, though, that he gets particularly uneven, as he tends to assume his characters instead of depicting them. His extreme environments, though, are not just the Yukon frontier, but also the trenches of the Great War and the expat community of bohemian Paris.
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man stands out in this regard, as his depiction of the Western Front circa 1916 is compounded by ambivalence towards what makes the environment extreme (war's horrors) and the demands of patriotism. As such, it plays interestingly off Sassoon's war poetry, not to mention Whitman's Civil War poems. It's his fifth collection, however, that's particularly interesting -- Ballads of a Bohemian is a fictionalized account of Paris in 1914 though the first year of the Great War, as shown through the poems and journal entries of an English-speaking expat. As such, it amounts to a short novel in verse + prose. The contrast here is with the attitudes and society as depicted in, say, Collette. I've generally ignored the expat writers of intra-War Paris, but now I want to follow up for more comparison.
His racism is about what you'd expect for the time. More grating to me is the casual, unexamined misogyny of his POVs, as it's harder to tell how much Service agrees with it. It is probably accurate for the characters and times and places, but still. Fair warning.
Books read: Songs of a Sourdough/The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses (1907, original/American title), Ballads of a Cheechako (1909), Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), Rhymes of a Red Cross Man (1916), Ballads of a Bohemian (1921)
Not read: The Shooting of Dan McGrew, a novelization by one Marvin Hill Dana. I'm more than a little afraid to peek at it, actually.
* Though not an unholyOMT one.
---L.