Powell's rhetorical gifts were also employed, with success, beyond politics. He was a poet of some accomplishment, with four published collections to his name: "First Poems"; "Casting Off"; "Dancer's End"; and "The Wedding Gift". His "Collected Poems" appeared in 1990. He translated Herodotus' "Histories" and published many other works of classical scholarship. He published a biography of Joseph Chamberlain, which treated the split with William Gladstone over Irish Home Rule in 1886 as the pivotal point of his career, rather than the adoption of tariff reform, and contained the famous line: "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of all human affairs". His political publications were often as critical of his own party as they were of Labour, often making fun of what he saw as logical fallacies in reasoning or action. His book "Freedom & Reality" contained many quotes from Labour party manifestos or by Harold Wilson that he regarded as nonsensical.