Winifred Letts was a novelist, playwright and poet. Born in Wexford in 1882, she was educated in Kent and at Alexandra College Dublin. She was successful first as a playwright, and is one of the few women to have had plays produced in the Abbey Theatre during the Revival period. She was a prolific writer of prose—of fiction for both adults and children and of accounts of the lives of saints. Her poetry may be divided into two types. She first became known for dialect verse celebrating the rural life of Leinster, as exemplified in her two volumes Songs from Leinster (1913) and More Songs from Leinster (1926). While work of this type has not sustained a strong critical reception in the post-Revival period, Letts shows a particular facility for the song as a mode and for the wit and energy of its language. Of more enduring significance are her representations of the First World War. Letts herself served as a nurse at a number of military hospitals, and her own experience brings precision to her descriptions and a great humanity to her representation of the combatants. These poems form the basis of Hallow-e'en and Poems of the War (1916), which was added to for its American publication in the following year, titled The Spires of Oxford and Other Poems.