Brecht was writing poems before he had written much else, and some sound judges consider him a poet above everything. His versatility was considerable; he wrote songs for guitar, free-verse lyrics, satire, sonnets, choruses, many of which were not published in his lifetime. In some ways Brecht is the heir to Heine, inheriting both his intellectual flippancy and his lyricism, his strong satirical and political bent, his anger and his technical facility, all of which makes him a very uneven writer. My own suspicion is that his verse will outlive all but a few of his plays, and in fact there are some signs of this happening already. This large collection is backed by very extensive notes.