Karl Marx was born in Germany but spent most of his life as a stateless exile in Paris, Brussels and London, where he died in 1883. As a student, he had dreamed of following a literary career and worked on poems, a novel and a play, before realising that his future lay elsewhere. Some 120 of his poems from 1836-7 survive and this chapbook contains a selection of poems in the tradition of German Romanticism, love poems to his future wife Jenny and satirical verse.