19 pages • 38 minutes read
Robert W. ServiceThe Cremation of Sam McGee
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1907A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Klondike Gold Rush
Although he was never a hands-on prospector, never succumbing to the gold fever that in the mid-1890s rocked the West Coast (really the world, thanks to sensationalized news accounts spread by cross-country newspaper empires), Robert W. Service arrived in Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon, in 1894, just in time for what became the Alaskan Gold Rush. Working at newspapers, however, Service was nevertheless enthralled by the tales of the Yukon Stampede that he heard from the locals, nicknamed Sourdoughs, who had ventured out into the arctic wastes in search of gold.
Like the California Gold Rush that electrified antebellum America a generation earlier, the Klondike Stampede attracted more than 100,000 would-be prospectors, few of which had any idea of the harsh conditions they would face. They were young dreamers, searching as much for adventure as for easy wealth. Indeed, historians now estimate fewer than 10% actually found the wealth of which they dreamed. The gold rush lasted barely two years; the boomtowns hastily erected along the Dawson Trail prospered and then collapsed into ghost towns.
The Alaskan Gold Rush, however, has maintained a presence in the American imagination. The Klondike Stampede combined the naïve and romantic pull of adventure tales with the brutal immediacy of Naturalism. Writers saw in the futile hunt for gold a mythic dimension: doomed courageous humanity challenging the life and death conditions only to learn the vanity of greed and the chilling reality of death. Although much of the legacy of the Alaskan Gold Rush is recorded in grim nonfiction accounts of life in the camps and recorded in hundreds of haunting black and white photographs, the adventure stories of Jack London, the epic novels of James Michener, the poems and stories of Service himself, and Charlie Chaplin’s endearing 1925 silent movie comedy Gold Rush have secured the Klondike Stampede a niche in the American imagination.
Cultural Context: The Manly Poets
At the turn of the 20th century, when poetry was often regarded as polite and fanciful and suited more for the delicate sensibilities of women, Theodore Roosevelt begged to differ. Roosevelt, who brought to his presidency (1901-1909) an aggressive and unapologetic sense of machismo and swagger, celebrated the power of poetry to inspire and give courage. He famously told a gathering of business titans in Chicago that a poet “can do much more for his country than the proprietor of a nail factory.” It was not only appropriate for men to read poetry, Roosevelt argued, but a requisite element in building character.
Service’s popular ballads about the brutal life along the Yukon wilderness represent this culture-wide reinvigoration of poetry by so-called manly poets. They used poetry, most often with galloping rhythms and thumping rhymes, to illuminate so-called manly topics: the life and death experiences in war; the challenge of building empires; the reward of singular acts of courage; the thrilling campaign to woo a woman’s heart; and, supremely, the nobility of fronting nature in the raw. These manly poets—among them Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Rudyard Kipling, Jack London, A. E. Housman, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Stephen Crane, and Thomas Hardy—drew their inspiration for the power of poetry from nothing less than Homer’s towering epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which celebrated the adventures of extraordinary men of courage and conviction who achieved daring and inspirational successes and endured heartbreaking tragic failures.
