Seeger had been falsely reported dead after the Battle of Champagne in October 1915, in which he had fought. The news of his actual death was met with public mourning in both America and France. After the USA entered World War I, "Poems", a posthumously published collection of Seeger's war poetry, sold out six editions in a year. The poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, who had described Seeger as "the Hedonist" after meeting him in 1911, suggested that it might be best that he had died in the war, "for I don’t believe that he would ever have come anywhere near to fitting himself into this interesting but sometimes unfittable world."