Charles Wesley was a writer not only of hymns, but of poems of many kinds-devotional, whimsical, satirical, political, controversial, topical, and personal. Their volume is enormous. He himself published 4,600 poems, another 3,000 were published posthumously, and there are still over 1,300 that have so far not been published at all, making a total of over 180,000 lines of verse.

The aim of this volume is to provide the means for an adequate appreciation of Charles Wesley as a poet. The verse is divided into three equal sections, "Hymns," "Sacred Poems," and "Miscellaneous Poems." It gives the text of 330 compositions, including examples of a hundred different verse-forms, and many poems that have never been published before.

Rev. Dr. Frank Baker (1910-1999), a native of Hull, England, joined the faculty of Duke University in 1960 and assumed the role of general editor of the newly-launched Wesley Works Editorial Project. Over the next twenty years Baker established himself as a premier scholar of the Wesleyan traditions. In addition to his work as a teacher, editor, and bibliophile, Frank Baker published over 250 items focused on Wesley and Methodist Studies.