SOURCE: "Poets of the Spanish Tragedy," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLI, No. 21, December 22, 1994, pp. 18, 20-2.

In the excerpt below, Knox examines Lee's account of the Spanish Civil War as presented in A Moment of War.

[Lee came to Spain] in the winter of 1937. He was twenty-three years old, and not yet widely known as a poet, though when in Spain he met Fred Copeman the commander of the British Battalion, who had been his strike leader when Lee worked as a builder's laborer in London, he was greeted with the words: "The poet from the buildings. Never thought you'd make it."

This was not his first visit to Spain. In the spring of 1936 he had sailed, with little more baggage than his fiddle, to Vigo on the northwest coast of Spain and made his way on foot, supporting himself by playing his fiddle to...