Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827) is one of the most popular and studied Italian poets. He is most famous for his long poem 'On Sepulchres', and his unfinished work The Graces. After a life of wanderings, he ended up in London, where he spent the last eleven years of his life mixing with high society and the greatest writers of the day, including Lord Byron. He died in poverty in Turnham Green, now part of London, and his tomb can still be seen in the Chiswick Old Cemetery.

Foscolo ranks among the most famous and enduringly popular poets in Italian literature, and in this collection, the only available in the English language, his most significant poems are collected in J.G. Nichols's lucid verse translation.

Expressing the author's political, civic and sentimental concerns, these poems will surprise the English reader with their immediacy and intimacy. Sepulchres, Foscolo's masterpiece, as well as being one of the pinnacles of European neoclassical literature, is still one of the most widely studied poems in Italy. Foscolo's poetry reveals the inner recesses of a passionate, restless and surprisingly modern mind.