Loved by many, loathed by many others, Roy Campbell was possibly the most controversial English-speaking poet of the 20th century. He lampooned the Freudian hypocrisy of the Bloomsbury Group, attacked the trendy socialist poets of the 30s and outraged the left by his uncompromising support for Franco's Nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War, arguing that Spain's fratricidal conflict was a straightforward fight between Christian tradition and communist atheism.
Following his conversion to Catholicism, Campbell wrote some of the finest spiritual verse of his generation. His masterly translation of the poems of St John of the Cross and the verse sequence Mithraic Emblems, which charted the poet's conversion, have rarely been surpassed.
Considered by many of his peers, most notably by T S Eliot and Edith Sitwell, as one of the greatest of the modern poets, Campbell's reputation has suffered because of his failure to be 'politically correct'. This new volume of his verse, published to coincide with a new biography, illustrates the perennial power of tradition over the facile fads of modernity.
"Modern poetry has lost a great huntsman who never spared the stupid, the complacent and the pompous; whose satire sang like a lasso ... he booms and roars and surges like the ocean breaking on the long empty beaches of his native Africa."
Lawrence Durrell
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Roy Campbell |
Roy Campbell was born in 1902 in South Africa, left it as a boy, and spent most of the rest of his enormously active life travelling the globe. After the early success of his poem Flaming Terrapin, he was courted by London's literary élite, but soon made the wrong sort of enemies when he lampooned the Bloomsbury circle. His alienation from the literary scene was consummated when he emerged as a strong defender of Franco during the Spanish Civil War, which he witnessed at first hand. During this period, he was received into the Catholic Church. His reputation as a major modern poet never fully recovered despite his vigorous opposition to Nazism, his widely admired translations of Lorca and St John of the Cross, and the esteem of such contemporaries as T S Eliot, Edith Sitwell and Dylan Thomas. Roy Campbell was killed in a car crash in 1957.
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Joseph Pearce |
His work includes biographies of Chesterton, Wilde and Solzhenitsyn, as well as an anthology of Christian poetry and a collection of essays on Tolkien. His biography of Roy Campbell, Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell, is soon to be published.
Roy Campbell - Selected Poems, compiled by Joseph Pearce.
170 pages, paperback. ISBN 1 901157 59 8.
£9.95 ; $16.95 in the U.S.A.
Published by The Saint Austin Press.
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