Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell -- better known as Roy Campbell -- was a South African poet and satirist. He was considered by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell to have been one of the best poets of the period between the First and Second World Wars. Campbell's vocal attacks upon the Marxism and Freudianism, and support for causes such as Francisco Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War, made him a polarizing figure.
In a 2009 essay, Roger Scruton wrote, "Campbell wrote vigorous rhyming pentameters, into which he instilled the most prodigious array of images and the most intoxicating draft of life of any poet of the 20th century... He was also a swashbuckling adventurer and a dreamer of dreams. And his life and writings contain so many lessons about the British experience in the 20th century that it is worth revisiting them".
“The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death.”
"The Sisters," lines 13-14
Adamastor (1930)
"The Serf," lines 12-14
Adamastor (1930)
“South Africa, renowned both far and wide
For politics and little else beside.”
The Wayzgoose, lines 3-4 (1928)
"Home Thoughts in Bloomsbury," lines 1-4
Adamastor (1930)
"Tristan da Cunha," lines 97-103
Adamastor (1930)
"On Some South African Novelists," lines 1-4
Adamastor (1930)
"Autumn," lines 1-5
Sons of the Mistral (1926)
“Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction,
Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire.”
"To a Pet Cobra," lines 23-24
Sons of the Mistral (1926)
"Horses on the Camargue," lines 41-48
Adamastor (1930)
“Translations (like wives) are seldom strictly faithful if they are in the least attractive.”
Poetry Review (June-July 1949)
