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The war poetry of Joseph Lee was once ranked alongside that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. But in the century since the First World War, his poems have slipped from the attention of both readers and critics.

Born in Dundee, in 1876 Joseph Lee worked variously for a local solicitor and then as a steamship stoker. His flowering skills with a pen - both in writing and sketching - led to him working as a newspaper artist in London. He returned to Dundee in 1906 and began to establish a reputation for himself as a writer and editor of a variety of local periodicals.
Lee was nearly 40 at the outbreak of World War One but he enlisted in the 4th Battalion of the Black Watch. During the time he was at the front, Lee was writing poetry and sketching and sending his work home. His poetry was collected in Ballads of Battle and Work-a-Day Warriors. Although Lee was captured and sent to a prisoner of war camp in Karlsruhe, south-west Germany, he continued to write and sketch.

Dundee University Museum holds a large selection of Lee's creative output. Deputy Archivist at the museum, Caroline Brown thinks the reason Lee may have fallen out of favour is that he wasn't an anti-war poet: "He was perhaps a people's poet. He wrote poems which were really about what he saw, just like an artist would sketch what they see. Perhaps that wasn't the kind of poetry that people wanted to remember after the war."