The Greatest Poet You've Never Read
Our Unfortunate Amnesia
As the acknowledged inspiration for Tolkien’s Aragorn, with a life as adventurous as Chesterton’s Innocent Smith, Roy Campbell is one of the most colorful and extraordinary men of the twentieth-century literary scene.
In 1924, this South African poet of Scottish and Irish descent burst onto the London literary scene at age twenty-two. Some eighteen months after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Campbell’s own six-part, book-length epic poem, The Flaming Terrapin, was both lauded and critiqued for its driving energy and unabating momentum, as well as the flamboyance and force of its splendidly dense imagery. “Its verve and extravagance,” the poet David Wright commented, “burst like a bomb in the middle of the faded prettiness of the ‘Georgian’ poetry then in vogue.”[1] Such praise was not limited to his initial success.
His contemporaries were beyond enthusiastic. The New York Times,[2] Eliot,[3] Dylan Thomas[4], and Edith Sitwell[5] all counted themselves among his deep admirers. Considered one of the best poets of the interwar period, Campbell has, on more than one occasion, garnered the moniker “the Byron of South Africa,” being like Lord Byron a fiery romantic whose devotion and adventurism involved him in foreign wars and literary feuds. One South African literary critic and friend, Uys Krige, would describe Campbell as a celebrator of life and as a poet drunk on sunlight. Such admiration continued even until his dying days.[6] And yet for all the optimistic forecasts lavished on his promising future, somehow this colorful, energetic poet faded into obscurity.[7] So why was Roy Campbell memory-holed?
The answer partly lies in Campbell’s somewhat unfortunate tendency towards vitriol. Campbell, it seems, had no “filter.” In fact, he had a penchant for lobbing Molotov cocktails in rhymed iambic pentameter at whomever and whatever made him angry, be it other writers, rival ideologies, or anyone in between. “His power of loving and hating,” as one friend and drinking buddy put it, is what “gives his verse its invariable strength and its frequent splendor,” for “Roy Campbell loved nearly everyone, including the numerous chaps he shot or thrashed in the course of his turbulent career.”[8] That love was often hidden, since his verse that followed in the tradition of Dryden and Pope was—even for his admirers—often “spoiled by spite.”[9] But his bad pugilistiic habits were not enough to ensure his obscurity.
Another reason is that Campbell was too often politically on the wrong side of public opinion. His initial support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War meant he was accused of fascist leanings, likely cooling his reception in America. But that allegation was not enough to wipe his name from literary texts or from many reputable anthologies. Ezra Pound’s support of the Axis powers, for instance, did not erase The Cantos from the literary sphere.
Rather, the fusion of Campbell’s inferred political views with his combative character made him anathema as a literary third rail. So much so that critics, even when praising Campbell’s poetry, take great pains to distance themselves from his personal life. “There can be few tasks less appealing than the rehabilitation of a universally despised writer,” writes Robert Richman in The New Criterion, for doing so “always the risk that the odium heaped upon the writer in his lifetime will rub off on the author of anything written in his defense after his death.” Whether involving his atrocious beliefs, wayward actions, disarrayed life, or perverse character, Richman assesses that “the question that needs to be asked about Campbell is not whether he was in many respects a repulsive character, of this there can be little doubt.”[10]
What Richman states might be conventional wisdom, but it is wrong-headed and heavily incomplete.[11] The Campbell of Richman’s assessment is shockingly different from the Campbell found in the pages of Joseph Pearce’s sympathetic, yet balanced biography, let alone the Campbell described by Uys Krige, or the Portuguese poet J. Paco D’Arcos.[12] In particular, D’Arcos’ biography emphasizes Campbell as the talented classical poet who approached life fundamentally as a fighter, be it in his hobby as an amateur bullfighter, his fighting as a soldier in the British army, or his time as a biting satirist.[13] The mere list of his occupations and adventures boggles the mind.[14]
Rightfully Campbell was often deemed a “poet of the sun,” one who demonstrated a huge capacity to rejoice in the miracle of creation and the endless potential of life—what Russell Kirk calls a kind of “Poseidon-Bacchus, Christian and pagan, in love with life.”[15] And even as his satirical work shows the depth of his contempt, this passion flowed from his zest-filled soul. His contempt arose from the same well that sprang his love for the world, and the force of his opprobrium was aimed at those who betray life-giving values fundamental to Campbell. It makes sense then that Dylan Thomas, another poet of great energy and exuberant passion, and Roy Campbell would find themselves friends. Popular legend has it that, during the Blitz, Campbell and Thomas ate a vase of daffodils in celebration of St. David’s Day![16]
So why should we today want to comb through used bookstores and obscure internet archives, like I have done, to unearth his verse? Were our curiosity not piqued by the enthusiastic reception of many of his contemporaries, I would add that for readers who appreciate poets who deftly handle regular meter and form, and for poets who wish to engender this skill within themselves, Campbell is a must. Even as this sort of versecraft has for a time fallen out of favor, often viewed as restrictive, stiff, if not downright dusty and associated with traditional worldviews authors wished to distance themselves from, there has been a renewed interest in poems that marry the use of form with a contemporary vernacular.[17]
There is nothing dusty about Cambell’s poetry—it sprang from his way of living. We should be captivated by what Uys Krige describes as his poetry’s “freshness, directness, zest and spontaneity,” a mirror for “the poet’s essential gaiety, love of life, the fire and verve in his make-up, his tremendous vitality.” And because “life for him was something splendid, something to be rejoiced over, something to sing of in clear, throbbing lark-like tones, or to trumpet on,” continues Krige, “one always felt a little drunk in his company; but it was a mental drunkenness, without a hangover.”[18] In that spirit, let’s drink the sunlight with Roy Campbell.
Out of Africa
Born and raised in Durban, South Africa, Campbell felt the pull of multiple worlds—Europe and Africa, religion and empire. Due to his family’s Scottish, Huguenot, and Irish heritage, he inherited a “psychology of both the oppressed and the oppressor,” from, on the one hand, the passionate Highland Catholicism of the Jacobites and, on the other, the lukewarm faith of Lowland Presbyterianism.[19]
Raised bilingual, he learned both English and Zulu. His father, a highly respected local doctor and community figure, treated all his patients equally, without regard to race or ability to pay. Thus Campbell himself mixed easily and freely amongst the native Zulu population as well as the colonialist professional and ruling classes.
As a child, Campbell read voraciously, but to call him bookish would be false. At an early age he showed signs of being a great “raconteur” and matched his verbal skill for storytelling with a penchant for wild antics and adventures. Among the schemes of an industrious and imaginative Campbell and his boyhood friends included staging fake wrestling matches with a live octopus before astonished groups of tourists, as well as capturing snakes and selling them to the local zoo, only to steal them away and resell them back.
When Campbell later departed for Oxford, England, he retained the colorful and bombastic fire of the local tribal culture, so much so that at Oxford he was nicknamed “Zulu.” This early childhood influence blazes forth in his poetry. The Zulu people, Campbell writes, are “highly intellectual” and “have a very beautiful language,” if “a little on the bombastic side and highly adorned,” such that “its effect on me can be seen in The Flaming Terrapin.”[20] Beautiful, bombastic, and adorned is not a bad description of his own writing. But Campbell was, as a British schoolboy raised in Africa, always—like the Gilbert & Sullivan line—“an Englishman.”
Always a vociferous reader, Campbell especially held the Elizabethan poets in high regard. Of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, as well as George Chapman, George Peel, and Jeremias de Dekker, he says “their poetry is so living and fresh it makes even the greatest work of Keats and Shelly seem just a bit artificial.” In sum: “I am absolutely drunk with these fellows” who “wrote poetry just as a machine gun fires off bullets.” These men “don’t even stop to get their breath,” but “go thundering on until you forget everything about the sense,” and “end up in a positive debauch of thunder and splendor and music.” And while “raw, careless, headstrong, course, and brutal,” notice “how vivid they are, how intoxicated with their own imagination.”[21]
In describing these Elizabethan authors, Campbell was likewise providing us with an apt description of his own verse, especially The Flaming Terrapin. Alongside the African and British sources was the major impact by Spanish and French authors as well.[22] Appropriately, the poet from whose imagination this epic poem arose is one who fearlessly tangled with octopuses. His earliest memory was being wheeled out in a carriage by his nursemaid to view the glittering azure of the Indian Ocean through the legs of a horse. This early primordial image proved to be the cornerstone of his poetic imagination which married the natural to the fantastic. This fusion is emblematic of Campbell, whose boldness of the expression drew from South African Zulus as much as the Elizabethan poets who so captivated him.
The point is that Campbell, despite his reputation for reactionary politics, was fundamentally multicultural in his upbringing and international in his tastes. The exact opposite of colloquial, he knew what it meant to be a revolutionary. Thus came a series of metamorphoses: in 1922, after dropping out of Oxford and marrying his wife, Mary Garman, in a whirlwind courtship, he completed the text of what would be published two years later: his book-length epic poem, The Flaming Terrapin (1924), to which we now turn.
The Star Is Born
Unfortunately, many of Roy Campbell’s poems are out of print, notwithstanding the heroic efforts of many recent editors in print and online.[23] Those wishing to gain an introductory overview of his corpus should begin with The Flaming Terrapin, the poem that launched him into the public sphere and contains themes that appear again in varying forms throughout the rest of Campbell’s poetic career. “A kind of manifesto”[24] written in the First World War’s immediate aftermath, Campbell himself called the poem “a symbolic vision of the salvation of civilization,” a “drama of creation, struggle, redemption, and restoration.”[25]
When I first heard the title, I asked, “what in the heck is a flaming terrapin? A turtle? An epic poem about a turtle?” But Campbell is plumbing deep waters in the creation myths of the Iroquois, Hindu, Mesopotamian, and African traditions. Campbell viewed the turtle as a symbol of strength, longevity, endurance, and courage, an emblem of the universe—all qualities that a disenchanted, war-ravaged Britain would benefit from.
In the poem’s universe, a mighty terrapin tows the Ark of Noah. Part I chronicles the origin of the creature, while Part II takes as its topic the great flood and starts with Noah preparing to build the Ark. Campbell writes:
When Noah thundered with his monstrous axe
In the primeval forest, and his boys
Shaping timbers, curved their gristled backs,
The ranges rocked and rumbled with noise.
As trees came crashing down lengthwise
And sprayed their flustered birds into the skies,
That plumed confetti, soaring far and frail,
With such a feathered glory strewed the gale,
That to the firmament they reared a new
But brighter galaxy: as they flew,
Their rolling pinions, whistling aflare,
Kindled in flame and music on the air. (Part II, Lines 1-12)
These lines roar across the page. Notice the active verbs—”thundered,” “rocked,” “rumbled,” “reared”—and strong gerunds—”shaping,” “crashing,” “whistling,” “rolling”—are coupled with an abundance of alliteration and assonance that lend an energy to his plentiful concrete images.
This energy, we will come to see, is emblematic of Campbell’s verse: Noah does not simply chop down a tree, he thunders, and not just with any old ax, but a monstrous one. The landscape itself seems to have its own agency as it rises to the level of character. The mountainous ranges rock and rumble with noise, the trees crash and send the birds to flight. While his excited language might in other contexts be considered hyperbolic, here it engrosses the reader. And Campbell sustains this level of Wagneresque intensity throughout the poem, only occasionally providing respite in softer passages.
Part III continues the journey begun in Part II. When the Ark encounters a storm around a nameless cape, it suffers from a fiend who has unleashed the dangers of Anarchy, Mediocrity, Sickness, and Corruption upon the world.
Now he comes prowling on the ravaged earth,
He whores with Nature, and she brings to birth
Monsters perverse and fosters feeble minds,
Nourishing them on stenches such as winds
Lift up from rotting whales. On earth again
Foul Mediocrity begins his reign:
All day, all night God stares across the curled
Rim of the vast abyss upon the world:
All night, all day the world with eyes as dim
Gazes as fatuously back at him. (Part III, Lines 127-136 )
Here Campbell’s verse thrums with vitality. This is true even when he is describing the very things that seek to drain the vigor from our existence, be they the devil, his courtly minions, or his offspring of “perverse monsters” and “feeble minds.” Note how Campbell’s meaning overflows the limits of his poetic line: rarely does he endstop, favoring a heavy use of enjambment to propel the reader forwards through the text at top speed, often running a single thought over the course of four to five lines as above. Campbell also extends personification beyond the natural landscape’s elements to raise abstract concepts like Mediocrity to the level of character. Everything, it seems, in this poem is alive.
Part IV recalls the opening of Book VII of Milton’s Paradise Lost through its use of invocation. The narrator sees “The Kraken, Time, convolved in scaley fold” and calls for the assistance of “the bookish Muses” and those “nourished on sunlight.” When the ark arrives at its destination with Noah and his sons, Corruption is defeated, and the terrapin goes off to renew the earth and defeat the devil.[26]
Let old Corruption on his spangled throne
Trembler to hear! The jagged rifts of stone
Roar for his mangled carrion: old Earth
Writhes in the anguish of a second birth,
And now casts off her shriveled hide, to be
The sun’s fair bride, as bright and pure as he! (Part IV, Lines 181-186)
Here Campbell lets his readers catch their breath, slowing the pace momentarily with caesura and shorter sentences, so as to enjoy the coming victory of life and goodness. Corruption has been put on notice, and old Earth, who has been besieged by destructive natural and spiritual elements, now moves into rebirth.
Part V introduces the marvel of “angel cowboys” who mend the connection between heaven and earth as they release the animals from the ark.
From the blue vault, with rosy glow
In shimmering decent,
Ten thousand angels fell like snow,
Ten thousand tumbling angels went
Careering on the winds, and hurled
Their rainbow-lazos to pursue
The wild unbroken world!
Saddled on shooting stars they flew
And rode them down with manes aflare,
Stampeding with a wild halloo,
Gymnastics in the rushing air.
Down on the hills with a shatter of flame,
The topsy-turvy horsemen came,
The angel cowboys, flaring white,
With lariats twirling, cracking whips,
And long hair flowing in the light,
Vaulting on the saw-backed ridges
Where they tear the sky to strips
And the crack of thunder bridges
Mountain-tops in dense eclipses
And the raven clouds, that with a shout
Pelting flowers, they beat about
And hounded through the sky. (Part V, Lines 30-53)
Until Part V, Campbell employed a steady use of the rhymed iambic pentameter in a line shifting seamlessly between heroic couplets and alternate rhyme. However, in the majority of Part V he deviates from his established meter, and pivots to shorter lines, largely tetrameter with the occasional trimeter line, while maintaining his previous rhyme scheme. The shorter lines, after the unrelenting intensity of sections I–IV, provide breathing room and give a sense of lightness not present in the previous sections.
The shorter lines also help speed this less weighty section along. Here we get the angel cowboys riding their shooting stars, “careering on the winds” with their rainbow lassos, and providing an uplifting catharsis with the animals all released:
Out of the Ark’s grim hold,
A torrent of splendor rolled–
From the hollow resounding sides,
Flashing and glittering, came
Panthers with sparkling hides. (Part V, Lines 69-73)
In Part VI, the final section, with its regeneration of the world completed, the terrapin’s work is done at last.
And the hushed ocean puckered into smiles,
Foamed at her feet around its shining isles:
And trees and mountains heard her joyful song
On plumes of towering eagles borne along. (Part VI, Lines 35-38)
One of the poem’s quieter moments, this final section moves between ecstatic vigor and gentle imagery expressed in a sonically soft vocabulary. Part VI is shot through with a mixture of spiritual-sexual imagery in the tradition of St. John of the Cross—whose works Campbell would later play a major role in saving.
Now the earth meets the sun through nerve and limb
Trembling she feels his fiery manhood swim:
Huge spasms rend her, as in red desire
He leaps and fills her gushing womb with fire:
And as he labours, sounding through the skies,
The thunders of their merriment arise!
Now each small seed, thrilled with their mighty lust,
Builds up its leafy palace out of dust. (Part VI, Lines 17-24)
Here, the poem again reaches an energetic crescendo of sexual imagery, with the earth personified as female and the sun as male, the mingling of these celestial bodies signifying the coupling and rebirth of the world.
Much like eating a full banquet of rich French cuisine without any subsequent bellyache, The Flaming Terrapin is a poem of continuous excesses that somehow manage to work as a whole. As one of Campbell’s contemporaries puts it, in an almost awestruck fashion: “His faults are flagrant, even brazen,” in that Campbell “dares to personify such old-fashioned abstractions as Corruption and Mediocrity,” and even “parallels the Miltonic fall of Satan” as well as “drags Amphion and Mars and Cerberus out of their ancient boxes.” Not just his themes, but Campbell’s rhetoric catches fire: “With loops and festoons of dependent clauses he alienates pronouns from their antecedents,” and yet despite there being “a monotony of tempo in this this poem,” somehow, “miraculously Mr. Campbell’s epic escapes tedium.” Being “neither ponderous or Miltonic,” the critic concludes, “he rides his muse with a lusty humor.”[27]
Indeed, this poem begs to be re-published in graphic novel form. The fantastical intensity and lush imagery easily lend themselves to artistic depiction, with a likely wide appeal amongst young students. Yet there is a gentler, more lyric side to Campbell’s poetry that we see even as early as The Flaming Terrapin, even if it is more fully realized in his later work. Take for instance the following passage from Part Six of The Flaming Terrapin:
Now by each silent pool and fringed lagoon
The faint flamingos burn among the weeds:
And the green Evening, tended by the Moon,
Sprays her white egrets on the swinging reeds. (Part VI, Lines 103-106)
His usually intense masculine drive gives way to quiet delicate images of almost haiku-like quality. We can rest in the long vowel sounds of the green evening and linger on the soft “f” and “s” sounds throughout the passage.
A Rebel with a Cause
On the tails of the Flaming Terrapin’s success, Campbell returned to his beloved South Africa to edit an ill-fated literary journal, the Voorslang (translated as “Whiplash”). Notably, he was later dismissed from the journal and socially ostracized, even by members of his own family, after using it as a platform to harshly and publicly critique his country’s apartheid policies (interesting then, that among the charges levied against him, are those of racism). With his usual bold disregard for preserving the delicate feelings of those he deemed guilty of injustice, he called his fellow white South Africans a nation of parasites.[28] Campbell desired to “direct all the knowledge I possess towards contradicting the evils of race-hatred and color-hatred that cause so much misery.”[29]
And that he did, at great personal expense, even persevering in controversy when, in response to local political scandal, he wrote and published the satirical poem, the “Waygoose” (1928). Upon his return to England, he briefly befriended members of the Bloomsbury group, but soon broke with them over an illicit affair his wife, Mary, had carried on with Vita Sackville-West. Further disgusted with their postwar nihilism as much as their sexual decadence, he came to view the group as “intellectuals without intellect.”[30] As a sobering moment of clarity, the fallout from the affair and break with the Bloomsbury set sparked his writing and publication of the lengthy, multi-part satire “The Georgiad” (1931), a part brilliant send-up and part immature attack.
The “Georgiad” and “Waygoose” both give a sense of Campbell’s more vicious, vitriolic voice. One might peruse them with a clear understanding that the poems will at times shine with clever wit, and at other times degrade into scathing invective. It is during these dips that the poems are more dull and less skilled. The “Waygoose” opens:
Attend my fable if your ears be clean,
In fair Banana Land we lay our scene—
South Africa, renowned both far and wide
For politics and little else beside. . . (Part I, Lines 1-4)
Both poetic satires, in taking aim at Colonial South Africa and the Bloomsbury group, show great skill, but their artistic merits would have benefitted with restraint and distance from events. Moreover, the moments of spitefulness that overtook sections of Campbell’s verse granted the literary establishment the permission to dismiss any righteous critique as the mere ravings of a scorned, petulant lunatic. Nonetheless, they showed a continual willingness to break with political and cultural elites and their governing principles.
. . . Or lack of them! For, “Campbell began to see the three aspects of the new elite—sexual inversion, anti-patriotism, and progressive politics—as aspects of a single frame of mind,” Roger Scruton notes. “These three qualities” meant “a refusal to grow up,” whereas Campbell saw “the role of the poet is not to join their Peter Pan games but to look beneath such frolics for the source of spiritual renewal.”[31]
One can see Campbell search for this source in his apocalyptic poetry inspired by the First World War. “This grotesque humanitarianism and spirit of reform and progress,” he writes in Taurine Provenance (1932), was “reducing us to a more savage state,” for “when one loves humanity as an abstraction,” it “is as often as not prompted by a hatred of men and women, as persons,” and without “any good” done “to humanity at all,” since “the Great War was fought to ‘save humanity.’”[32]
Thus far, Campbell found what he was against —the degradation of life in whatever form —and he would stand up for everyday people even if it meant betraying his own class, whether from established authority in conservative South Africa or bohemian counterculture in progressive London. But what was he for? To answer that question Roy Campbell, a fusion of Africa and England, went to continental Europe.
Crucible of Faith
After the fallout from Mary’s affair, Roy then departed England for the small Provençal town of Martigues, France, where he was followed shortly thereafter by his wife and young children, as husband and wife reconciled. There, in the Mediterranean air of southern France, and inspired by the life of the local peasants and fisherman, he published the poetry collection, Adamastor (1930), to great acclaim and sold widely enough to merit a third printing.
The book, taking its title from the Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes’s mythological character symbolizing the Cape of Good Hope, is filled with poems that showcase Campbell’s facility with quieter lyric poetry.[33] Consider this excerpt from “The Garden”:
Soft fall the laurel-scented hours
Rinsed with the golden light, and long
For those in faith and virtue strong
Shall rain upon their bed of flowers:
While through its fall of silver sheer
Ascends the music of the spring
With fluted throat and jewelled wing
To sing as ever through the year,
How Love was like a Laurel sprung
Within whose quiet ring of shade
Beauty and Wit, like man and maid,
Have lain as we since earth was young—
While all the crowns that glory weaves
To buckle on victorious brows
Were offered for their tent of boughs,
Around whose stillness vainly grieves
The valour that has daunted time,
And all the deathless flow of rhyme
Is but a wind among the leaves. (Lines 13-31)
Campbell’s recurring talent for personification comes to the fore in this languid meditation. The abstractions of Beauty and Wit become characters that: “like man and maid, have lain as we since earth was young.” The action is centered in a garden filled with birdsong, delicate scents, and golden light. Campbell’s ample use of liquid consonants—fall, laurel, golden, light, long—work with these images to create the poem’s meditative mood, and make it a joy to read aloud.
Neither the first nor the last poet to value life in accord with the seasons and rhythm of the land, Campbell preferred what he viewed as the more enduring nature of rural life versus the fleeting trappings of the city. It was here in Provençe, that the Campbells found themselves, for the first time, immersed in a people whose everyday lives were infused with Catholicism.
Campbell, for all of his high culture and traditionalist sensibility, found much to admire in people of all stations and classes. Just as there was no class or clique so respected he would not critique or parody, likewise there was no person so humble or place so poor he would not befriend or visit. One can see this in the company he kept during his time in Martigues and his easy welcome of new friends.
When Uys Krige first met Campbell in rural France in October 1932, Krige had yet to establish himself and his reputation. Campbell immediately invited this unknown and unannounced stranger and fellow writer at his door into a trip down to the local pub where they ended up conversing all night. “Our conversation had been like a Marathon race,” Krige recalls, “with Roy miles out in front, followed by half a dozen fishermen, a French aristocrat and sculptor, a Spanish taxi-driver, a carpenter, a basketmaker, an ex-circus clown, a punch-drunk boxer, a broken down bullfighter, the local gravedigger, and myself”—at the time an unknown young writer—“lost somewhere in the middle of that motley straggling field.”[34]
Roy Campbell’s life, like his personality, constantly combined opposites and often went from one extreme to another. Thus he followed the publication of Adamastor with another epic poem, The Georgiad (1931). At its core, The Georgiad was a scathing indictment of the Bloomsbury group so harsh that it turned the wider literary community against him. Thus, the good fortune, funds, and reputation he had enjoyed following the publication of the one poem was quickly reversed after the publication of the other. Campbell, of course, did not care. He just moved elsewhere.
In 1933—after, one of his many misadventures, legal trouble forced him to flee France—the Campbells moved to Spain, where Roy published further lyric poetry in his collection, Flowering Reeds (1933),[35] and where, in 1935, his family converted to Catholicism. Residing in a humble chabolismo, the family was drawn into the life of the nearby church. “Their exile from England, their rejection of the sybaritic culture of the new elite, and their search for an enduring loyalty,” Scruton narrates, “all pointed in the same direction,” and all members soon joined the Catholic faith, thanks to the local priest and rejoicing villagers.[36] When the Campbells moved to Spain, they lived first in Barcelona, then Valencia, and then Altea, where they were received into the Catholic Church, before finally settling in Toledo.
“Mass at Dawn,” one of the most well-known of Campbell’s lyric poems, prefigures this conversion and, goes thusly:
I dropped my sail and dried my dripping seines
Where the white quay is chequered by cool planes
In whose great branches, always out of sight,
The nightingales are singing day and night.
Though all was grey beneath the moon’s grey beam,
My boat in her new paint shone like a bride,
And silver in my baskets shone the bream:
My arms were tired and I was heavy-eyed,
But when with food and drink, at morning-light,
The children met me at the water-side,
Never was wine so red or bread so white. (Lines 1-11)
Sometimes a poet’s art understands more than the poet himself. Such is the case with this one of Campbell’s most celebrated sonnets. Written when he was living in the majority-Catholic Provençe countryside, several years prior to his conversion, “Mass at Dawn” on its surface celebrates the intense appreciation of red wine and white bread after a long night of fishing.
Its final line—“Never was wine so red and bread so white”—captures the sense of being reborn and seeing with new eyes which baptism brings. The Christian imagery includes the likening of the narrator’s boat to a bride, the presence of the fish, and of course the bread and wine. The poem’s colors can also be read literally and figuratively. The gray moonlight represents the soul-deadening weight of worldly concerns and sin that gives way to sunlight in the new life and vivid colors of the baptized Catholic.
His book, Mythraic Emblems (1936), contains many of the poems written in the lead up to his religious conversion. While not necessarily his strongest work, they chronicle Campbell’s Catholicism, and therefore deserve a read.[37] One of them, “The Morning,” goes as follows:
The woods have caught the singing flame
in live bouquets of loveliest hue—
the scarlet fink, the chook, the sprew,
that seem to call me by my name.
Such friendship, understanding, truth,
this morning from its Master took
as if San Juan de la Cruz
had written it in his own book,
and went on reading it aloud
until his voice was half the awe
with which this loneliness is loud,
and every word were what I saw
live, shine, or suffer in that Ray
whose only shadow is our day.
Once again Campbell makes the natural world come alive as if it were a character, but here we find there is an intimacy between the speaker and personified nature that was not present in earlier works. The narrator is no mere observer, but an affected participant. The woods call him by name, giving us a glimpse into his interior life as he becomes a friend with nature.
Such bliss was short-lived, however, for in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, the Campbells had to make a narrow escape with their lives.
Thus Strikes the Cheka: Toledo, 1936
In Toledo, the Campbells lived not far from a Carmelite Monastery where they befriended many of the monks. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, it arrived at Toledo’s doorstep that July. Rightly fearing the worst, the Carmelite monks requested that the Campbells shelter their archives, which included the personal papers of St. John of the Cross. This move proved providential: within a matter of days after the trunk containing the archives was secretly transported to the Campbell residence, the monastery’s seventeen monks were rounded up and executed in the street by firing squad.
Roy Campbell discovered their bodies “left lying where they fell, under a sheet of tarpaulin when he ventured out that evening.” Alongside these bodies of the Carmelites were, he told his family, “the Maristas, another order of priests,” also lying in the street. As Joseph Pierce writes: “Swarms of flies surrounded their bodies and scrawled in their blood on the wall was written, ‘Thus strikes the Cheka’.”[38]
Following the massacres, the Carmelite monastery was set ablaze. And while they sheltered the Carmelite archives, escaping destruction, the Campbells remained in danger. They hid away all their religious artifacts, and Roy Campbell prayed to St. John of the Cross, “making a vow that he would translate the saint’s poems into English if his family’s lives were spared.”[39] (Which they were, and which he did.)
As Mythric Emblems also contains some of the poems that capture the horrors of 1936 Spain and the Red Terror,[40] Campbell would immortalize this incident in his poem, “Toledo, July 1936.” Below is the poem it its entirety:
Toledo, when I saw you die
And heard the roof of Carmel crash,
A spread-winged phœnix from its ash
The Cross remained against the sky!
With horns of flame and haggard eye
The mountain vomited with blood,
A thousand corpses down the flood
Were rolled gesticulating by,
And high above the roaring shells
I heard the silence of your bells
Who’ve left these broken stones behind
Above the years to make your home,
And burn, with Athens and with Rome,
A sacred city of the mind.
In this short epistolary poem, Campbell addresses a beloved place that captivated him on site, and imbues Toledo with a personhood that makes visceral his description of those violent events.
What happened in Toledo was not an isolated evil. Throughout Spain, the Republican forces were systematically destroying churches and religious buildings, loading huge bonfires with religious artifacts—crucifixes, vestments, missals, &c.—looted from churches and private homes, as well as hunting down and killing clergy. This was a campaign to annihilate religion completely, and wipe all remnants of its existence from the face of the earth. In Catalonia alone, more than one hundred villages whose names began with Sant or Santa were renamed.[41]. Of the thousands of clergy murdered, half took place in the first initial weeks, such as in Toledo, where about half the priests were murdered.[42] Even Fr. Gregorio, the priest who had received the Campbells into the Church, did not escape death at the hands of the Republican forces.
Their methods of execution were various and vicious.[43] The historian Quintin Aldea interviewed a parishioner who had murdered his parish priest:
“I killed, among others, Father Domingo, at Alcaniz.”
“Dear me! And why did you kill him?”
“It’s quite simple. Because he was a priest.”
“But then, did Father Domingo meddle in politics or have personal enemies?”
“No sir, Father Domingo was a very good man. But we had to kill all the priests.”[44]
The reader might not agree with a man who had seen these horrors and come to side with the Nationalists, but some intellectual sympathy is needed for one who experienced the Red Terror under the watch and guidance of the Republicans. The Nationalists under Franco committed their own share of atrocities, but given the information he had in 1936, Campbell’s early support of Franco is understandable.
Though it is just one contributing factor to the relative obscurity into which his poetry has fallen, it took this “visitor from Africa, who had been raised among the Zulus,” Scruton notes, “to recognise that the bolshevik nihilism that threatened Spain in the 1930s was of a piece with the upper-class narcissism that animated the English fellow travelers, and they would succeed or fail together.”[45]
Fighting the Good Fight
Having witnessed the atrocities of the Red Terror, Campbell returned to Spain hoping to volunteer to fight with the Carlists, but ended up settling in Portugal as a war correspondent to accompany the Nationalist Army. The poems contained within his book, Flowering Rifle (1939)—a book-length epic poem on Spain that was subtitled, “A poem from the “Battlefield of Spain”—were written during this time. As expected, the book was not well received.
In this collection, Campbell’s anger overtook his artistry. Gone was “Campbell’s exacting attention to the shape of lines and sound of words, the hallmarks of Adamastor and Flowering Reeds,” remarks Richman.[46] After this period of poetry which marked (as some allege) “the gradual disintegration of Campbell’s poetic skill,”[47] it seems that in later life, Campbell’s most successful poetic efforts are found not in poems of his original composition but of his own translations. In those, his unfettered emotions did not overtake his versecraft, but were reigned in by the boundaries established of what he was translating.
Still impassioned by the Spanish Civil War, it came as no surprise that Campbell volunteered for the British army when World War II began. Despite being over the prescribed age for enlistment, he eventually made his way into the King’s African Rifles, capturing his experiences while continuing to take poetic pot-shots at left-leaning establishment poets in his next book, Talking Bronco (1946). As the book appropriates its title from a jab made at Campbell by Steven Spender years prior in his harsh review of Flowering Rifle, Cambell issues Spender no quarter. Reviews of this volume vary widely, from overtly positive reviews from Poetry Review, The New English Review, and The Sunday Times, to those critics who either lambasted Campbell for his satirical poem’s offensive content, or simply panned it for having some of the same issues that plagued Flowering Riffle.[48]
Campbell was discharged in 1944 after contracting Malaria and returned to England, where his reputation enjoyed a period of rehabilitation due to a decline of the Bloomsbury set. He even started working for the BBC. There he was “a passionate advocate for his favorite drinking companion, Dylan Thomas,” which “led to the latter’s immortal radio drama, Under Milk Wood.”[49] Campbell also published his autobiography, Light on a Dark Horse (1950), the first issue of his Collected Poems, and his translations of St. John of the Cross.[50] Believing his family was saved by the prayers of this saint, the poet made them available to the whole Anglophone world.
Roy Campbell is still known for these translations, at least in certain circles. In total, he translated St. John of the Cross, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Charles Baudelaire, and took the calling seriously, given how much he recoiled from the damage bad translations often visited upon poetry. His brief poem, “On the Martyrdom of F. Garcia Lorca,” illustrates his passion for taking care with translations, and perhaps shows his motivation for doing so many of his own:
Not only did he lose his life
By shots assassinated:
But with a hatchet and a knife
Was after that—translated.
No Prophet Is Accepted In His Own Country
In 1952, the Campbells moved to Portugal, continuing to prefer a simple life. “I could sit a hundred years on the hills,” he told a friend, “watching the pigs eating the acorns under the oaks.” During that visit, this friend recalled that Campbell was “wearing an immense Portuguese cloak of sheepskins”—one that was stolen the week before and, because the thief was shorter than Campbell, had a foot of cloth cut off its bottom. When the police apprehended the thief, the coat along with its“scissored skins’’ were returned to Roy, who promptly sewed the coat back together and wore the thing as if nothing happened.[51] Like the Flaming Terrapin, his satires, politics, religion, and translations, Campbell sought to sew back together what thieves had rendered asunder.
When Roy Campbell died in 1957 in a car accident at the age of 56, his reputation still held strong. Campbell’s “rough diamond personality and irrepressible storytelling,” as Scruton describes it, “were greeted with amazement in the subdued literary world of postwar London.”[52] Despite his cannon fires at the political left—even once mounting a stage and knocking out Stephen Spender after being denounced[53]—Campbell was nearly worshiped in conservative circles and admired in the mainstream. Russell Kirk noted the irony in his death: “The greatest adventurer among my friends” had gone “over a cliff in Spain, [even] though he had survived terrible wounds in six different countries.” For, “to die in an automobile was an ironical end for Roy, who detested all machines, but loved horses and bulls.”[54]
In life, Roy Campbell was— and now, in death, is— a polarizing, albeit uncircumspect man who broadcasted his thoughts aloud from rooftops. Certainly he would be a modern-day publicist’s nightmare. It is hard to even tell who Campbell really was. Once, when his wife questioned him on whether he actually had been a shepherd, he replied: “How can you tell? There are years in my life you can’t account for. I might have been a shepherd, for all you know.”[55] But this outrageous vivifying love of life remains at the core of the allure for both his personality and his poetry.
After all, is Campbell the man truly so much more objectionable than so many others in our poetic cannon? Hidden in the inner workings of a man’s interior self are often dark and gruesome thoughts. Most people hide these darker selves under a veneer of politeness. Not so with Campbell, who was just more honest about it. Despite a small penchant to exaggerate his own exploits, he was hopelessly authentic: his life bled onto the page.[56] When asked if Campbell’s reported war exploits were real, his friend and Nobel Prize-winning author, Camilo José Cela, replied, “What does that matter?” The wandering journalist with a gun was a walking mystery, so “put it down that everything he wrote was quite true. The real Campbell is the Campbell of his books.”[57]
How many other poets that we appreciate today might have been cast aside had they been as liberal in voicing their thoughts as Campbell? And how many of our own opinions and biases will be cast aside by future ages? It is surely better for us to engage directly with Campbell’s poetry and judge it on its own merits, for those that do will be well rewarded. “Of Roy Campbell’s poetry,” Krige fittingly concludes, “I should like to say, finally, that whatever its faults may be—and there are serious limitations, of course, at times—when all the cliques, claques, and coteries of our time have settled into their rightful little grooves, Roy Campbell will stand out as one of the few really powerful lyrical voices of his generation in the English language.”[58]
Has enough time passed for us to be able to properly appreciate Roy Campbel? Are we, now, ready to drink deeply the poetry of the sun?
Quoted in Joseph Pearce, Catholic Literary Giants: A Field Guide to the Catholic Literary Landscape (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 185. ↩︎
One reviewer called Campbell after the release of his second volume of poetry Adamastor, “a force for poetic rejuvenation.”
Percy Hutchison, “In Roy Campbell a Force for Poetry’s Rejuvenation; The Author of The Flaming Terrapin Produces a Second Volume of Remarkable Individuality and Vigor,” New York Times, 25 January 1931, sec. BR, 2, online.
For the succeeding quotation (“[some of] us call him the Byron of South Africa”), also see Percy Hutchison, “In Roy Campbell…”, ibid. ↩︎T.S. Eliot praised him for his “remarkable mastery of meter and language.”
Quoted in Robert Richman, “The Case of Roy Campbell,” The New Criterion, vol. 2, no. 1 (September 1983), 29, online. ↩︎Dylan Thomas: considered him to be a “poet of genius.”
Quoted in Nicholas Joost, “The Poetry of Roy Campbell,” Renascence, vol. 8, no. 3 (Spring 1956): 115-120, 120, online. ↩︎See Edith Sitwell, “Roy Campbell,” Poetry, vol. 92, no. 1 (1958): 42–48. ↩︎
In the mid-1950s the Times Literary Supplement lauded Campbell as “one of the three outstanding poets in the English language.”
Quoted in Uys Krige, “Roy Campbell as Lyric Poet: Some Quieter Aspects,” English Studies in Africa, vol. 1, no. 2 (1 September 1958): 81-94, 87. ↩︎As George William Russell wrote in the Irish Statesman: “No other poet I have read for many years excites me to more speculation about his future.”
Joseph Pearce, Catholic Literary Giants, ibid, 185. ↩︎Russell Kirk, “Last of the Scalds,” Beyond the Dreams of Avarice: Essays of a Social Critic (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1956): 326-334, 326; Russell Kirk, “Percy Wyndam Lewis,” Confessions of a Bohemian Tory: Episodes and Reflections of a Vagrant Career (New York: Fleet Publishing, 1963): 127-129, 128. ↩︎
Joseph Pierce, Catholic Literary Giants, ibid, 192. ↩︎
Robert Richman, “The Case of Roy Campbell,” ibid, 29-30. All this throat clearing happens before discussing any of Campbell’s literary merits. ↩︎
Richman is certainly not alone at leveling accusations of racial and political backwardness at Campbell—and to be fair, even some of Campbell’s own carelessly strewn-about words might lead one to wonder about his views—the judgment is uncharitable, lacks context, and not so clear a case as Richman simply assumes. ↩︎
See Joseph Pearce’s book, Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell (London: Harper Collins, 2001), as well as his summary chapter on Campbell in Catholic Literary Giants: A field Guide to The Catholic Literary Landscape (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005). ↩︎
J Paco D’Arcos, “Roy Campbell: The Man and the Poet,” Modern Age, vol. 13 (Fall 1969): 353-362. ↩︎
“Mr. Roy Campbell, a faithful lover and a hot hater, a soldier, a sailor, a hunter, a bull-fighter, a horse-breeder, a critic, a translator, a champion of religion, a great brawny Carlyle-hero of a man, a South African and a Scot and a Latin rolled into one gigantic frame, a singer of sea-chanties, a master of pencil-sketching, a High Tory, a great drinker, a great talker, one of the fiercest and kindest beings alive— this adventurer is one of the few modern poets likely to be read a hundred years from now, or two hundred … Once I sat with him in his London flat. A bomb had gone through the house from top to bottom, during the war, but the ceilings and floors had been patched so that one would hardly notice: and so it is with Roy Campbell himself. Shot and slashed and beaten and burned in two terrible wars and various private feuds, his vast barrel-torso is too grim a sight for him to like to appear on a public beach; a piece of plastic substitutes for a bone in one of his legs; his spine has been broken and his eardrums have been shattered; he has been knifed by gypsies in Spain, torpedoed and half-drowned in the Hebrides, savaged by beasts in South Africa, clubbed by Communists in Toledo, tossed by bulls in the Camargue.”
Russell Kirk, “Last of the Scalds,” ibid, 326. ↩︎Uys Krige, “Roy Campbell as Lyric Poet: Some Quieter Aspects,” ibid, 85; Herbert Palmer, Post-Victorian Poetry (London: J.M. Dent & Sons LTD, 1938), 220; Russell Kirk, “Last of the Scalds,” ibid, 326. ↩︎
Alexander Theroux, Einstein’s Beets: An Examination of Food Phobias (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphic Books, 2017), 271. ↩︎
“There are poets writing today who demonstrate a mastery of craft…[and] who write lyric poems but narrative poems as well, and who have helped poetry recover its capacity to represent and reflect on the depths and drama of human experience … Those same poets have recovered the art of verse as a pure medium for the truth about reality, including in its religious dimension, without recourse to that sometime consolation prize, the romantic subjective idealization of nature. Among the contemporary volumes being published are not a few poems of such intelligence, craft, and capaciousness that a child someday will read one and remember it effortlessly. In the mind and on the lips of that child, poetry will remain a living art.”
James Matthew Wilson, “The Patient on the Table: On the Somewhat Exaggerated Death of Poetry,” The European Conservative (No. 29): 68-71, 71, online. ↩︎Uys Krige, “First Meeting With Campbell,” Theoria, vol. 12 (Pietermaritzburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 1959): 24-28, 24. online. ↩︎
Joseph Pearce, Catholic Literary Giants, ibid, 190. ↩︎
Quoted Joseph Pearce, Catholic Literary Giants, ibid, 184. ↩︎
Quoted in Joseph Pearce, Catholic Literary Giants, ibid, 186. ↩︎
Krige notes the impact on him of several French poets from such as Leconte de Lisle, Alfred de Vigny (who is especially present in Campbell’s “Tristan da Cunha”), Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Tristan Corbiere, and Frederic Mistral, as well as the Spanish poets Ruben Dario and Federico Garcia Lorca. The French influence was stronger, noted Krige, but only because Campbell read them earlier in his writing career.
Uys Krige, “Roy Campbell as Lyric Poet,” ibid, 89-93. ↩︎Joseph Pearce compiled a sampling of his poems in a paperback volume simply entitled Roy Campbell: Selected Poems which was most recently published in 2018 by Chavagnes Press and is widely available now. Outside of this volume, you must make your way to a used bookstore or online used booksellers to locate one of a variety of volumes of his selected poems, such as: Roy Campbell Selected Poetry edited by Joseph M Lalley (1968), Roy Campbell: Selected Poems edited by Michael Chapman (2004), Poems of Roy Campbell chosen and introduced by Uys Krige (1969), or The Selected Poems of Roy Campbell chosen by Peter Alexander (1982). A three-volume set of his complete poems is also available. If you are not opposed to reading electronically, there is an inexpensive Kindle edition of his collected poems that encompass the whole of his body of work from The Flaming Terrapin through his translations of St. John of the Cross and Lorca. Also, thanks to our Canadian neighbors to the north, you can find free electronic versions of The Collected Poems of Roy Campbell Volumes 1 and 2, available for download in pdf and html format on Fadedpages.com, for Volumes 1 and 2. ↩︎
Tony Voss, “The Flaming Terrapin and the Valley of a Thousand Hills: Campbell, Dhlomo and the ‘Brief Epic’,” Journal of South African Studies, vol. 32, no. 3 (September 2006): 449-466, 451. ↩︎
Quoted in Tony Voss,”The Flaming Terrapin…”, ibid, 453. ↩︎
Tony Voss, “The Flaming Terrapin…”, ibid, 454. ↩︎
Mitchell Dawson, “Sound and Fury,” Poetry, vol. 25 no. 4 (January, 1925), 217-220. ↩︎
“We have no excuse for our parasitism on the native and the sooner we realize it the safer for our future. We are as a race without thinkers, without leaders, without even a physical aristocracy working on the land. The study of modern anthropology should be encouraged as it would give us a better sense of our position in the family tree of Homo sapiens – which is among the lower branches: it might even rouse us to assert ourselves in some less ignoble way than reclining blissfully in a grocer’s paradise and feeding on the labour of the natives.”
Roy Campbell, quoted in Joseph Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 63 ↩︎Peter Alexander, “Campbell, Plomer, Van Der Post and Voorsland,” English in Africa, vol. 7, no. 2 (September 1980): 52. ↩︎
Quoted in Ryan West and Beau Patterson, “The Bloomsbury Group,” English Literature: Nineteenth Century (Waltham Abbey, UK: Ed-Tech Press, 2019), 57. ↩︎
Scruton continues: “The new elite, in Campbell’s opinion, lived as bloodless parasites on their social inferiors and moral betters; they jettisoned real responsibilities in favor of utopian fantasies and flattered themselves that their precious sensibilities were signs of moral refinement, rather than the marks of a fastidious narcissism.”
Sir Roger Scruton, “A Dark Horse,” American Spectator, 12 October 2009, online. ↩︎The passage in full goes: “The most vulgar and degrading spirit which is active in modern life is that bastard of decadent Protestantism which expresses itself vicariously sometimes as humanitarianism, as socialism, as fabianism, as “sportsmanship,” or as vegetarianism— to which last the vegetable kingdom replies scornfully with carnivorous plants, man-eating trees, and deadly poisons. It is this grotesque humanitarianism and spirit of reform and progress which has bathed Europe in innocent blood during the last hundred years without conferring any benefits at all, but only reducing us to a more savage state. When one loves humanity as an abstraction or joins the S.P.C.A., it is as often as not prompted by a hatred of men and women, as persons: and it does not do any good to humanity at all; the Great War was fought to “save humanity.” …the Protestant liberal consciousness does not live or enjoy life, but gets much more out of what it eschews, renounces, or forbids than out of anything else.”
Roy Campbell, Taurine Provençe (London: Desmond Harmsworth, 1932), 18. ↩︎Pierce, Catholic Literary Giants, ibid, 131. Lesser known of those poems perhaps would be “The Garden,” “Autumn,” and “The Sleeper.” ↩︎
Uyes Krige, “First Meeting With Roy Campbell,” ibid, 28. ↩︎
These would include “The Flowering Reed,” “Song,” “Swans,” “The Secret Muse,” and “Choosing a Mast.” Here is the collection’s title poem, “The Flowering Reed,” in its entirety:
When the red brands of day consume
And in the darkening Rhone illume
The still reflections of the reed,
I saw its passing leagues of gloom,
Torrential in their strength and speed,
Resisted by a rosy plume
That burned far down among the weed;
As in the dark of Tullia’s tomb
The frail wick-tethered phantom set
To watch, remember and regret,
Thawing faint tears to feed its fume
Of incense, spent in one long sigh
The centuries that thundered by
To battle, scooping huge moraines
Across the wreck of fifty reigns;
It held a candle to the eye
To show how much must pass and die
To set such scatheless phantoms free,
Or feather with one reed of rhyme
The boulder-rolling Rhone of time,
That rafts our ruin to the sea. ↩︎Roger Scruton, “A Dark Horse,” ibid. ↩︎
Poems such as “Morning,” “San Juan Sings,” “The Seven Swords,” “To Wyndham Lewis,” “Mithras Speaks I & II” give a sense of Campbell at this stage. ↩︎
Joseph Pearce, Bloomsbury and Beyond, ibid, 186. ↩︎
Joseph Pearce, “The Man Who Saved The Papers of St. John of the Cross,” The Imaginative Conservative, 31 October 2016, online. ↩︎
See especially “Toledo 1936,” “Hot Rifles,” “Christ in Uniform,” and “Posada.” ↩︎
Julio de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition, and Revolution: On Atrocities Against the Clergy During the Spanish Civil War,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 33, no. 3 (July 1998): 355-369, 363. ↩︎
Official statistics indicate that during the Spanish Civil war 6,382 members of the Catholic clergy were massacred. Those murdered included 13 bishops, 4,172 diocesan priests and seminarists, 2,364 monks and friars, and 283 nuns. Approximately half of these deaths took place within the first month-and-half of the war alone.
Julio de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition, and Revolution,” ibid, 355-357. ↩︎Some of the religious were killed by decapitation, others burned alive, others burned in the town square after they were dead, some were crucified, some were flayed, others tortured, often through mutilation of genitalia, before they were killed. Most of the murders were not particular priests killed for supposed wrongs or their political alliances, but simply because they were clergy. This was true persecution i.e., “systematic violence practiced on the members of a human group, for whom the sole fact of belonging to that group was a sufficient reason for them to become a recipient of violence.”
Julio de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution…”, ibid, 362. ↩︎Quoted in Julia de la Cueva, “Religious Persecution, Anticlerical Tradition, and Revolution,” ibid, 361. Cueva mentions: “The fact was spontaneously related to Aldea in the course of a casual conversation in Munich in 1956 (Quintin Aldea Vaquero, ‘Guerra civil (1936-1939)’ in Hubert Jedin (ed.), Manual de Historia de la Iglesia, X [Barcelona 1987], 331)” (fn. 21, 361). ↩︎
Roger Scruton, “A Dark Horse,” ibid. ↩︎
Robert Richman, “The Case of Roy Campbell,” ibid, online. ↩︎
“”...I fear this is just the beginning of what we shall see of the gradual disintegration of Campbell’s poetic skill under the batterings of a political philosophy which was not only sterile in itself , but invited him to demonstrate that shrill anger which had marked his years in London…”
John Povey, Roy Campbell (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 165. ↩︎Joseph Pierce, Bloomsbury and Beyond, ibid, 268. ↩︎
Joseph Pearce, Unafraid of Virginia Woolf: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2004), 333. ↩︎
Roger Scruton, “A Dark Horse,” American Spectator, ibid. ↩︎
Russell Kirk, “Last of the Scalds,” ibid, 327. ↩︎
Scruton continues: “To Evelyn Waugh, he was a “great beautiful simple sweet natured savage,” and to Laurie Lee “one of our last pre-technocratic big action poets who, like D’Annunzio and Byron, were not only the writers of exquisite lyrics but whose poetry was part of a physical engagement with life.” He was admired by T. S. Eliot, who published him, by the Sitwells, who idolized him, and by a whole range of writers and artists of a conservative or Catholic persuasion, from Father Martin D’Arcy and Wyndham Lewis to Charles Tomlinson and Augustus John.”
Roger Scruton, “A Dark Horse,” ibid. ↩︎Stephen Masty, “Roy Campbell: Knight Errant of the Permanent Things,” The Imaginative Conservative, 14 November 2011, online. ↩︎
Russell Kirk, “Roy Campbell,” Confessions of a Bohemian Tory (New York: Fleet Publishing, 1963): 132-135, 132. ↩︎
Russell Kirk, “Roy Campbell,” ibid, 134. ↩︎
Kirk recalls:
Once I asked him if he had seen much hard fighting in Abyssinia, where he had been a sergeant of the King’s Africa Rifles. “No, that was nothing,’ he murmured. Yet on another occasion he mentioned that in one Abyssinian fight, “My poor camel was so brave: he stood up and was shot through the head.” The latter account was accurate, I think.
Again, I happened to mention the Isle of Eigg, in the Hebrides—a strange place I know well. Roy remarked, casually, that his transport had been torpedoed off Eigg, and he had swum all the way to shore, using the Sgurr of Figg—a tall fantastic hill of obsidian—as a landmark. Haying myself seen in Eigg the graves of unknown soldiers and sailors whose corpses were cast ashore from that British transport, and knowing the lay of the Small Isles, I could tell that he spoke the truth—though he never bothered to mention this episode in his writings.
Russell Kirk, “Roy Campbell,” ibid, 134. ↩︎Quoted in Russell Kirk, “Roy Campbell,” ibid, 134. ↩︎
Uys Krige, “Roy Campbell as Lyric Poet,” ibid, 94. ↩︎
Tamara Nicholl-Smith is a writer, workshop leader, and spoken-word performer from Houston, Texas. Her poetry has appeared in America Magazine, Ekstasis Magazine, and the Benedict XVI Institute, while her reviews and essays have appeared in Front Porch Republic, Quarter Mile Smile, and Dappled Things. She invites you to follow her on her website and on X.
Featured image: Roy & Mary Campbell (left), Jacob & Dolores Kramer (right) in photo (c. 1920) from Virginia Nicholson's Among the Bohemians via Wikimedia Commons.
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