Howard Willard Cook, Our Poets of Today — Chapter IX: Robert Service…
“ Service, an ardent motor enthusiast, enlisted as an ambulance driver early in the war. Stories of the bravery of his exploits cannot be given here, but he has faced the shell-stormed road with his loads of wounded, he has lived the things he writes, and just as he has analyzed the Yukon man, so has he interpreted the struggles of the soldier of to-day. ”
Howard Willard Cook, Our Poets of Today — Chapter IX: Robert Service…
“ Within Service there was a desire that could not be quelled to express the various scenes and adventures through which he was living and so he gave us his poems of real men, “red blood men” they have been called, men who talk in a vigorous tongue, men whose primal instincts and passions spur them to labour, to dream, to achieve, to bow down before defeat in fact, human men. These are the men of “The Spell of the Yukon.” ”
Howard Willard Cook, Our Poets of Today — Chapter IX: Robert Service…
“ While man makes sewers and artillery, Grim bayonets, and howitzers and shell, The battle-squadron surging through the tides, Ten thousand hecatombs of reeking red And all the vile magnificence of War. Jesse E. Middleton is the only son of the Rev. E, Middleton of the Canadian Methodist Church, and was born in Wellington County, Ontario, Canada, on November 3, 1872. His father is of English birth, but his mother, Margaret Agar, is a native Canadian. His home education, which was very thorough, was supplemented by High School training. ”
