Volume 41, Number 21 · December 22, 1994
Poets of the Spanish Tragedy
By Bernard Knox
Edwin Rolfe: Collected Poems
edited by Cary Nelson, edited by Jefferson Hendricks, introduction and notes by Cary Nelson
University of Illinois Press, 337 pp., $34.95
Edwin Rolfe: A Biographical Essay and Guide to the Rolfe Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
by Cary Nelson, by Jefferson Hendricks
University of Illinois Library/University of Illinois Press, 118 pp., 11.95 (paper)
A Moment of War: A Memoir of the Spanish Civil War
by Laurie Lee
New Press, 178 pp., $9.95 (paper)
The University of Illinois Press, which published Milton Wolff's Spanish Civil War novel Another Hill, reviewed in the last issue, has also launched a project entitled The American Poetry Recovery Series, which 'will consist of collections and anthologies by poets whose work has not been made part of the traditional literary canon, including labor poets, feminist and minority poets, and socialist and anarchist poets.' The first volume in the series collects the poems of Edwin Rolfe, who fought in the Lincoln Battalion in Spain. It is a reprint of the three collections of his poetry printed in 1936, 1951, and (posthumously) 1955, together with a great many uncollected and unpublished poems, but excluding, except for a small selection, poems written 'before Rolfe matured as a writer.' It is an impressive body of work, set in its historical, literary, and biographical context by Cary Nelson's masterly introduction.
Review, 4040 words
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