Edwin Rolfe (1909-54) is best known as the poet laureate of the Abraham
        Lincoln Battalion, the Americans who volunteered to help defend the elected
        Spanish government during its 1936-39 civil war. His career began in the
        revolutionary Left in New York in the 1920s and continued into the 1950s,
        when Rolfe wrote searing poetry attacking the McCarthy-era witch-hunts.
 

  "Rolfe's voice is one that many of us feared was buried forever.
        . . . He stands in the forefront of an entire 'lost generation' of left-wing
        writers who fused artistic craft with irrepressible political commitment."
        -- Alan Wald, author of The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected
        Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment
      "[Rolfe's] Spanish Civil War poems may be the best written by an
        American writer, and his McCarthy era poems brilliantly counteract the
        often apolitical, rather socially aseptic poetry of their time."
        -- Reginald Gibbons, editor of TriQuarterly
      The radical journalist and poet Edwin Rolfe wrote eloquently of the hardships
        of the Great Depression, the experience of war, and McCarthy era witch-hunts.
        More than fifty of his best poems--some beautifully lyrical and some devastatingly
        satiric--are included in Trees Became Torches. Rolfe was widely
        known as the poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, the Americans
        who volunteered to help defend the elected Spanish government during the
        1936-39 civil war.