John Shaw Neilson was born at Penola, in South Australia, in 1872 and died seventy years later in Melbourne. His education was elementary and inadequate; he lived always, both with his family and as a wanderer, by the sweat of his brow: as a shearer, a farmhand, a quarryman, a roadmender, and, at Yallourn, as a mine worker. His eyesight was poor and he often had to write by candlelight, or even to dictate his verses to some of his tent-mates. Yet this simple, gentle man produced some of Australia's finest and most delicate lyrical poems. This collection of his work has been assembled by Professor A.R.Chisholm, who also includes an extensive critical and biographical study of the poet in his introduction. It incorporates Collected Poems, first published in 1934, the two subsequent books Beauty Imposes (1938) and Unpublished Poems of Shaw Neilson (1947), and a selection from Witnesses of Spring (1970)