Bertolt Brecht was one of the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th cen-tury. Baal, The Threepenny Opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany, Saint Joan of the Stockyards, The Life of Galileo, Mother Courage and Her Children, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and dozens of other plays have made a hugely powerful impact on the development of drama in the modern era. The weight of these profoundly influential plays have tended to bury the significance of Bertolt Brecht’s poetry. For a long time, certainly in the English-speaking world, his poems were hardly noticed and considered absolutely peripheral to his work in drama. He himself scarcely bothered to publish his poems – no more than 170 of the 1,000 poems that have subsequently been discovered were printed in his lifetime (he died in 1956). More than any other great writer, except Franz Kafka, Brecht was quite content that a substantial part of his achievement should remain unknown during his lifetime.
In recent years more and more of his poems have come to light and have been published and translated. Gradually