Roy Campbell (poet)

Roy Campbell (2 October 1901 – 22 April1957) (full name: Ignatius Royston Dunnfries Campbell) was a South African poet and satirist. He was born in Durban and was educated at Durban High School.

Related Topics:
2 October - 1901 - 22 April - 1957 - South African - Poet - Satirist - Durban

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His first loves were literature and the outdoor life. He became an accomplished horseman and fisherman and was fluent in Zulu

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He left South Africa in 1918 intending to matriculate at Oxford University. He never did, yet his intellectual life bloomed in the university city. He wrote verse imitations of T.S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine, and later met Eliot, the Sitwells, and Wyndham Lewis. He published his first collection of poems The Flaming Terrapin 1924 when he was just 22.

Related Topics:
South Africa - 1918 - Oxford University - 1924

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This established his reputation as a rising star. Moving in the literary set, he criticised the Bloomsbury Group whom he thought were sexually promiscuous, snobbish, and somewhat anti-Christian.

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His satire The Georgiad (published in 1931) was a scathing attack on them. His wife?s affair with Vita Sackville-West (who was the lover of Virginia Woolf) was a contributing cause to this.

Related Topics:
1931 - Vita Sackville-West - Virginia Woolf

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Returning to South Africa, he started Voorslag a literary magazine along with William Plomer and Laurens van der Post. However, he found the local cultural scene to be too introspective. After publishing the satirical poem The Wayzgoose 1928 he moved to France.

Related Topics:
William Plomer - Laurens van der Post - 1928 - France

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The French period saw the publication of Adamastor (1930), Poems (1930), The Georgiad (1931) and the first volume of his autobiography Broken Record (1934).

Related Topics:
1930 - 1931 - 1934

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Moving on to Spain, he supported General Francisco Franco and the Nationalist Army during the Spanish Civil War. Finding great sympathy with the Catholic faith, he and his family converted in the small Spanish village of Altea in 1935. His support for Franco was expressed in Flowering Rifle 1939.

Related Topics:
Spain - General Francisco Franco - Nationalist - Spanish Civil War - Catholic - 1935 - 1939

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This support made him many enemies but he was convinced that the civil war was a basic conflict between Christian standards and tradition and communist atheism. Most Western artists and writer?s sympathies lay with the republicans during this time. His support against the weight of public opinion has coloured the later reviews and analysis of his work.

Related Topics:
Christian - Communist - Atheism

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Although he served in the British Army during the Second World War (reaching the rank of sergeant) and fought against the same fascists that he had once supported, his reputation never recovered.

Related Topics:
British Army - Second World War - Sergeant - Fascists

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Campbell was invalided out of the army in 1944. He subsequently moved to Portugal in 1952. Here the second volume of his autobiography Light on a Dark Horse was published.

Related Topics:
1944 - Portugal - 1952

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Campbell?s conversion to Catholicism inspired him to write what some consider to be the finest spiritual verse of his generation. He translated the poems of St John of the Cross and documented his conversion in verse in Mithraic Emblems 1936.

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He was killed in a car accident in Portugal on Easter Monday 1957.

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Although considered by some of his peers e.g. T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell to have been one of the best poets of the 20th century, his uncompromising support of unfashionable causes and his ability for making bitter enemies of influential people resulted in his decline into relative obscurity.

Related Topics:
T.S. Eliot - Dylan Thomas - Edith Sitwell - 20th century

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