The Spell of The Yukon and Other Verses

Philadelphia: Edward Stern & Co., Inc, 1910. This may be the first printing from this publisher. Hardcover. Good. Format is approximately 5.25 inches by 7.5 inches. 99, [1] pages. Cover has some wear, soiling, and bumped corners. Decorative front cover. Name in ink on fep. The contents include: The Land God Forgot, The Spell of the Yukon, The Heart of the Sourdough, The Three Voices, The Law of the Yukon, The Parson's Son, The Call of the Wild, The Lone Trail, The Pines, The Lure of Little Voices, The Song of the Wage-Slave, Grin, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, The Cremation of Sam McGee, My Madonna, Unforgotten, The Reckoning, Quatrains, The Men that Don't Fit In, Music in the Bush, The Rhyme of the Remittance Man, The Low-Down White, The Little Old Log Cabin, The Younger Son, The March of the Dead, "Fighting Mac", The Woman and the Angel, The Rhyme of the Restless Ones, New Year's Eve, Comfort, The Harpy, Premonition, The Tramps and L'Envoi. Robert William Service (January 16, 1874 - September 11, 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 traveling in the Western 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 gold-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".