And over the course of the next two seasons, the Festival arranged development workshops during which we fashioned and refined a new musical; the main impetus from these poems, and the driving force from the very adventure of doing it. Through the process, I have come to truly love the poems, and greatly admire the poet. What started as an interesting challenge became a labour of love - and, of course, a commission.

Service was an inventor, a shaper of images and stories, of places he'd never even seen, things he had never done; a bank ledger keeper with a boundless imagination. Most of his Klondike poems were written long before he saw the Klondike, but he makes you believe, and he fills your head with wonder.

The story I have written is nothing close to the truth, of course; I wanted the poems themselves to write the story. Some things are historical: Service worked at the Bank of Commerce, he was an eccentric figure who slept on top of the vault, he had an unrequited love and, of course, he pined for adventure. But writing poems was his true passion, both his destination and the trail that led there; this musical story is a tip of the hat to that journey.

I also resisted the forced bonhomie around the campfire. This was the early sixties, with the "folk revival" in full swing, and the sight of a suburban dad with a guitar in hand threatened rousing versions of "Michael, Row the Boat Ashore" and "Kumbaya." One night, though, an ancient bearded guy (he must have been all of forty!) got up and told us all that he was going to recite a poem, and before you knew it,

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold

was ringing out in the woods and we were all transfixed by Service's fabulous tale "The Cremation of Sam McGee." I distinctly remember being absolutely shocked and delighted by the narrative and entranced by the rhythm of the storytelling. In retrospect, wasn't this the best possible setting in which to be introduced to the work of Robert W. Service?

Of course, I grew up and by the time I was in college, freshman English had taught me that real poetry was that written by the likes of Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot, and by the time I encountered Allen Ginsberg, I was too cool for school, and my childhood enthusiasm for Service had to be put aside for more serious artistic endeavours.

Popular artists like Service have a tough row to hoe. Mind you, they are often crying all the way to the bank. Many sources claim that Service was the best-paid poet of the twentieth century, with "The Cremation of Sam McGee" alone having made over half a million dollars for the author during his lifetime. Despite the enormous success of his work (and not just at campfires), the critical establishment will tell you that this kind of work is just doggerel, crude and sentimental, and really not worthy of our attention.

Service was well aware that his work was never going to be taken seriously. But he seems to have been more than content to have the approval of his audience in lieu of that of critics:

Ah yes, I know my brow is low

And often wished it high.

So that I might with rapture write

An epic of the sky;

A poem cast in contour vast;

Of fabled gods and fays;

A classic screed that few would read

Yet nearly all would praise.

One is reminded of Céline Dion's famous comeback to the critics of her Las Vegas show: "We've been sold out for four years. The audience is my answer."

Now, while one could argue that Service's work displays a lot more skill and artistry that the kitsch-riddled oeuvre of La Dion, the fact they both topped the charts a century apart is instructive in how we tend to judge popular art. Critic Carl Wilson's wonderful Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, an exploration of popular culture as reflected in Céline's career, serves as an excellent guide to our response to work like Service's. Wilson observes that much popular art deals with problems that don't require huge leaps of the imagination to ponder. In Service's case, the poems address fairly accessible themes: the desire for adventure, the comforts of conformity, the need to take advantage of our brief time on this planet, and so on. The work provokes not blinding insights into the nature of the human condition but often a restatement of relatively conventional values. One likes to think that the artistic experience, at its best, comprises great truths lit by lightning, but more often the quieter assurances of presenting what binds us together, especially as it is reflected in popular culture, are much more likely to resonate with a greater number of audience members. It also behooves us to remember that before he was canonized by the academy, Shakespeare was embraced by the denizens of the pit at the Globe and the inhabitants of mining camps in the rough-and-tumble West.

And while the warm glow of nostalgia often enhances our experiences of work like Service's, I am convinced that there is more here than just fond memories of simpler times or shared experience of accepted truths. Wilson quotes filmmaker Guy Maddin as observing that he doesn't think "melodrama is life exaggerated, but life uninhibited" - which would suggest that narratives like "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" reveal more about real emotion and feeling than we might want to admit. The colour and exotic trappings of the Gold Rush in "McGrew" might seem to distance us from the material, but if Maddin is right, they actually allow us to connect to the themes of passionate love, revenge and betrayal in a wonderfully subversive way. While our more intellectual and highbrow selves might find much of what Service is saying to be corny and trite, once we let the infectious rhythm of his verse pull us forward, we can come to appreciate that, as one fan has articulated, the work is a "lilting thing, clear, clean and power-packed, beating out a story with a dramatic intensity that makes the nerves tingle."

One of the many great achievements of Wanderlust is that it forces us to reconsider Service's work. Most of these poems were written over a hundred years ago, and they capture the spirit of a time and a popular culture that can seem very remote from our twenty-first-century world. Carl Wilson's attempt to try and understand the popularity of Céline Dion forced him to acknowledge that other people's tastes are obviously legitimate and revealing. It made him more democratic. Art snobs might have little traffic with Céline - or Robert Service, for that matter - but shouldn't we strive to understand the values at work outside of our own personal artistic comfort zone? As Wilson states, "Through democracy, which demands we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps become less strangers to ourselves."

And maybe, just maybe, that's what happened to me when I first heard "The Cremation of Sam McGee" around that campfire so many years ago. Our unknown storyteller, charged up by Service's incredible tale and rollicking verse, brought us all together, as we are now, in this theatre, and we indeed did share an experience that our own lives could not generate. Especially a snotty-nosed, insufferable little kid who was too smart and too prissy and too good for camping with his family.

Bob White is dramaturge for Hirsch and Consulting Director, New Plays, for the Festival.