E.A. Rolfe

Edwin Rolfe (September 7, 1909 – May 24, 1954) was an American poet and journalist. His first collected poetry appeared in an anthology of four poets called We Gather Strength (1933). Three more collections followed, none of which were conventionally published. To My Contemporaries (1936) was published by the small Dynamo Press and included works by Archibald MacLeish. First Love and Other Poems (1951) was sold to subscribers. Permit Me Refuge (1955) was posthumous and published by the California Quarterly, whose editor Philip Stevenson took up a collection from Rolfe's friends, such as Albert Maltz, to pay for it. Thomas McGrath wrote its foreword. Rolfe's poetry was inseparable from historical events: it responded to the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, and the era of McCarthyism. As a poet and journalist, he contributed extensively to The Daily Worker between 1927 and 1939. According to a biography from the Poetry Foundation fellow poet Reginald Gibbons said his ”Civil War poems may be the best written by an American writer.”When the University of Illinois Press brought out a collection of his best poems, they called him "the poet laureate of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion."