Collected Poems

      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.
 

Edwin Rolfe's Collected Poems brings together the body of his work that we believe will be of greatest use to those readers with a general interest in American political poetry and with a specific interest in Rolfe himself. It gives people for the first time a comprehensive view of one of the more inventive political poets of the Great Depression, of the writer Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War regard as their poet laureate, and of a writer who used poetry as a weapon against the reactionary politics that dominated the United States in the 1950s.