While Henry Lawson is known primarily for his short stories and prose sketches, he also wrote a substantial amount of verse. Collections of his poetry include In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses (1896), Verses, Popular and Humorous (1900), and When I Was King and Other Verses (1905). Henry Lawson’s Collected Verse is published in three volumes (edited by Colin Roderick, 1967-1969).

Henry Lawson, while at the height of his career in the 1890’s, was a truly popular writer: He wrote for and about the common people of Australia, and he was read by those people. Fortune, however, did not follow fame for him, and though his work was published, read, and admired, he lived most of his life in penury and often misery. Even so, he was the first Australian writer ever to receive a state funeral, and his portrait was put on the ten-dollar note in 1965. His reputation, then, has always been high in Australia, though with different people for different reasons at different times; he has yet, however, to receive the recognition he no doubt deserves among readers of fiction in the rest of the world. By any acceptable standard, Lawson, at his best, is a masterful short-story writer.