A beautiful collection of Hofmannsthal's poems and verse plays Hugo von Hofmannsthal published his first poem in 1890, when he was a schoolboy of just over sixteen. The lyrical phase of his artistic life lasted for roughly ten years; though he continued to write poems after this period, nearly all those he thought worth preserving are from that decade. During the same years, he began to write lyrical plays, and these belong to a stream of dramatic creativity that continued uninterrupted until his death in 1929. This volume brings together twenty-five of his finest poems along with six verse plays: Death and the Fool, The Emperor and the Witch, The Little Theatre of the World, The Marriage of Zobeide, Prologue to the "Antigone" of Sophocles, and the first act of The Mine at Falun. The book features the original German texts on facing pages.