Service sticks very strictly to rhyme and meter patterns that were considered passé after the likes of T.S. Eliot hit the poetry marketplace. It's a matter of taste and fashion, but lit professors feel entitled to be arbiters of taste, and will continue to do so.

In addition to Robert Service, I grew up loving the poems of folks like Eugene Field, and he is considered rather minor by modern lit folks also. Sobeit, I still like him. If you ask lit professors about their literary "guilty pleasures," I suspect you'll find a remarkable number of them who also like these poems. (They also read escapist novels of all sorts--I've quizzed the lit folks in my university about this more than once and enjoyed their answers).

SRS