Trees Became Torches

"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.