CANADA AUTHOR · POETRY · FRONTIER AND PIONEER LIFE
Robert W. Service
Also known as: Robert Service, Robert W., Service
"Robert Service was born in England in 1874. After spending his childhood in Scotland he came to Canada and there commenced the life of wandering and adventure which has given birth to songs, rhymes, ballads and poems that have spread over the whole world. His vagabond career, bounded by Alaska and Turkey, by England and Mexico, has been such a diversity of add jobes in so many places than an actual chronicle of it is well nigh impossible. Mr. Service, who escaped to America from the German invasion of France, later returned to that country where he spent the remainder of his days. In his poetry, however, he still lives as a vagabond in the hearts of his many readers. He has caught the spirit of wanderlust latent in every one of us and his verses will live on forever."
There's sunshine in the heart of me,
— from Rhymes of a rolling stone, 1912
Most acclaimed
Rhymes of a Red Cross man
1916
A series of evocative and moving poems written while the author was serving with the Red Cross on the front lines in WWI. The poems are dedicated to the author's brother who was killed in action in France the year of publication. -- vendor's description.
The shooting of Dan McGrew
1969
A narrative poem set in the Yukon describing the shoot-out in a saloon between a trapper and the man who stole his girl.
Poems
This is an edition of all the known poems of Mark Akenside, the eighteenth-century English poet and physician, whose poetry has not been newly edited for more than a century. This edition will thus provide scholars and students with a much-needed opportunity to reassess the extent of Akenside's contribution to literary culture, and it will also clarify his role in the development of the aesthetic theories of his own generation and the one that followed. The career of Mark Akenside (1721-70) spans a period of extraordinarily fast change in English literature: his first major poem, The Pleasures of Imagination, appeared in the year of Pope's death; and Akenside died in the year Wordsworth was born. His works not only reflected the very considerable changes that took place during these years; they also contributed in many ways to the shifts in focus, interest, and emphasis that characterize the literature of the later eighteenth century. Akenside's fascination with the imagination, its characteristics and functions, resulted in an intriguing and influential blend of the poetic and the philosophical in his longer poems, The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) and The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). The earlier work explores the then new subject of aesthetics in greater detail than it had ever been explored before, presenting various original insights and arguments. Yet it would be wrong to see the poem as merely a versified philosophical treatise; its complex structure offers satisfactions beyond those of sequential logic, and the examples cited to illustrate the central ideas are imbued with considerable vigor and clarity. As products of, and contributors to, the eighteenth-century enthusiasm for aesthetics, Akenside's longer poems are captivating examples of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiment in developing the philosophical poem into a major literary form. It is for this reason above all others that they are valued by Coleridge and the writers of the next generation. Because of the comparative obscurity into which Akenside's works fell after the demise of the long philosophical poem in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they have not by and large attracted the attention of modern bibliographers. In this edition numerous bibliographical and textual puzzles presented by his poems are solved for the first time. The apparatus, meanwhile, demonstrates the full extent of the poet's urge to revise - an urge that extended from the wholesale rewriting of some poems to subtle alterations of textual minutiae, showing a mind and an ear alive to nuances of meaning and intonation.