Siegfried was written in the early 1940's. Its first appearance in a book of collected poems was in 1945, when it was included in Little Friend, Little Friend. Jarrell himself considered Siegfried to be one of his best war poems (Pritchard, p. 120), and it was among those which he sent to Margaret Marshall, who was so impressed that she offered him a position at The Nation (Pritchard, p.133).