Sassoon's fame as a novelist and autobiographer, and the success of his posthumously publishedDiaries, have somewhat obscured his achievement as a poet. Apart from the famous War Poems of 1919, which firmly established his reputation, he published eight volumes of verse during his lifetime. This collected edition represents his own choice of the poems he wished to preserve. It was first published in 1947 and subsequently enlarged to include the late poems in Sequences.

"For his generation, the poetry and career of Siegfried Sassoon were emblematic of the ways in which the secure truths of Western civilization were destroyed in the hopeless foxholes of the First World War. It is difficult to imagine the works of Virginia Woolf or Hemingway or Faulkner existing without him. . . ." --Graham Christian, THE BOSTON PHOENIX