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Roy Campbell (poet) Quotes

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".

✵ 2. October 1901 – 22. April 1957
Roy Campbell (poet) photo
Roy Campbell (poet): 10 quotes1 like

Famous Roy Campbell (poet) Quotes

“The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death.”

Roy Campbell (poet)

"The Sisters," lines 13-14
Adamastor (1930)

“The timeless, surly patience of the serf
That moves the nearest to the naked earth
And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.”

Roy Campbell (poet)

"The Serf," lines 12-14
Adamastor (1930)

“South Africa, renowned both far and wide
For politics and little else beside.”

Roy Campbell (poet)

The Wayzgoose, lines 3-4 (1928)

“Of all the clever people round me here
I most delight in Me –
Mine is the only voice I care to hear,
And mine the only face I like to see.”

Roy Campbell (poet)

"Home Thoughts in Bloomsbury," lines 1-4
Adamastor (1930)

“We shall not meet again: over the wave
Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless –
But mine is short and crooked to the grave:
Yet what of these dark crowds, amid whose flow
I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless –
Are not their generations, vague and endless,
The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?”

Roy Campbell (poet)

"Tristan da Cunha," lines 97-103
Adamastor (1930)

“You praise the firm restraint with which they write –
I'm with you there, of course:
They use the snaffle and the curb all right,
But where's the bloody horse?”

Roy Campbell (poet)

"On Some South African Novelists," lines 1-4
Adamastor (1930)

Roy Campbell (poet) Quotes

“I love to see, when leaves depart,
The clear anatomy arrive,
Winter, the paragon of art,
That kills all forms of life and feeling
Save what is pure and will survive.”

Roy Campbell (poet)

"Autumn," lines 1-5
Sons of the Mistral (1926)

“Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction,
Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire.”

Roy Campbell (poet)

"To a Pet Cobra," lines 23-24
Sons of the Mistral (1926)

“With white tails smoking free,
Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show
Their kinship to their sisters of the sea –
And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow.
Still out of hardships bred,
Spirits of power and beauty and delight
Have ever on such frugal pastures fed
And loved to course with tempests through the night.”

Roy Campbell (poet)

"Horses on the Camargue," lines 41-48
Adamastor (1930)

“Translations (like wives) are seldom strictly faithful if they are in the least attractive.”

Roy Campbell (poet)

Poetry Review (June-July 1949)

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