"Because it is prettier to protest an unrequited love / than to protest the murder of a people," Edwin Rolfe wrote in 1948, "my poems are not popular in my own land." These lines, taken from a poem written late in Rolfe's life and never published, characterize the tensions embodied in his poetry and in his literary career in general. Although his early work, published during the 1930s, received significant critical attention and seemed to mark him as one of the most promising poets of his generation, Rolfe's career languished from the postwar period onward. Most scholars attribute this decline to Rolfe's passionately leftist political convictions, distinctly out of vogue throughout the last decade of his life, as well as his ongoing refusal to adapt to the more introspective, confessional poetic modes of the 1950s. Rolfe's reputation has again ascended, however. Two collections of his poetry published in the 1990s...