This volume contains the complete poetical works of Francis Thompson, scarcely known even by name in this country until several years after his death. His growing popularity illustrates the truth of his humorous remark that "poets are like Roman emperors, and only become gods when they die." Thompson is now recognized as a major poet, a poet "by the visitation of God," as he would have said. And since major poets cannot help writing, he had to suffer the consequences of it, and spend his life in sorrow, destitution and anguish.

Thompson's poems, writes Edward J. O'Brien, "are eminently characterized by a wealth of imagination, and a magnificence to which no other modern poet but Shelly has been able to attain. Indeed, Thompson's 'Ode to the Setting Sun' may be ranked with the few sublime odes in the language; nay you may almost say the same of 'The Hound of Heaven,' which carries the same appeal as 'Ecce Homo.' It is such high poetry as this which makes us claim Thompson as a member of the great Victorian Pleiad."