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Roy Campbell: Selected Poems
"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". Sir Roger Scruton.
184 pages, Paperback
Published March 29, 2018
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About the author
Roy Campbell
92 books21 followersRoy Campbell was an Anglo-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.
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April 12, 2024
Roy Campbell, was a South African poet born in Durban in 1901, who died in a car crash in Portugal in 1957. Campbell wrote vigorous rhyming pentameters, which included a concatenation of images and a celebration of life unlike any other poet of the 20th century. He was a raconteur, a satirist, whose “Georgiad” earned him the hatred of the English literary establishment. In addition, he was a soldier, an adventurer, a man of action, and a devout Catholic.
Campbell came to England from South Africa in 1918, to study at Oxford, from which he left without a degree. In 1924, he published a remarkable poem that was to make his reputation: “The Flaming Terrapin,” a vivid vision of the hidden sources of myth which engender life. Campbell’s world was shaped by the Book of Common Prayer, “Hymns, Ancient and Modern,” and in the poems and tales of Kipling. It was an imperial society suffused with class privilege, and a sense of prerogative.
J. M. Lalley, the editor of the first edition of “Selected Poetry,” wrote that Campbell “preferred the society of sailors, fishermen, cattle-herders, and even prize-fighters to that of other writers” and is known today because he appeared at a meeting of the Inklings; J. R. R. Tolkein’s account of the occasion is effusive for its adulation. Today, Campbell is an obscure figure; he was equally at home with the intelligentsia and working men, with Medieval Spanish Catholicism and the barbarity of modern warfare.
His translation of St. John of the Cross is unparalleled in English:
Upon a gloomy night,
With all my cares to loving ardours flushed,
(O venture of delight!)
With nobody in sight
I went abroad when all the house was hushed.
Or:
I entered in, I know not where,
And I remained, though knowing naught,
Transcending knowledge with my thought…
And Campbell was perhaps the greatest English speaking lyric poet of the twentieth century. The concluding portion of his “Horses on the Camargue” is illustrative:
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 hardship bred,
Spirits of power and beauty and delight
Have ever on such frugal pasture fed
And loved to course with tempests through the night.
He was admired by T. S. Eliot, who published his work, Edith Sitwell, who wrote about him, and by a host of writers and artists of Catholic persuasion, from Father Martin D’Arcy and Wyndham Lewis to Charles Tomlinson and Augustus John.
Campbell came to England from South Africa in 1918, to study at Oxford, from which he left without a degree. In 1924, he published a remarkable poem that was to make his reputation: “The Flaming Terrapin,” a vivid vision of the hidden sources of myth which engender life. Campbell’s world was shaped by the Book of Common Prayer, “Hymns, Ancient and Modern,” and in the poems and tales of Kipling. It was an imperial society suffused with class privilege, and a sense of prerogative.
J. M. Lalley, the editor of the first edition of “Selected Poetry,” wrote that Campbell “preferred the society of sailors, fishermen, cattle-herders, and even prize-fighters to that of other writers” and is known today because he appeared at a meeting of the Inklings; J. R. R. Tolkein’s account of the occasion is effusive for its adulation. Today, Campbell is an obscure figure; he was equally at home with the intelligentsia and working men, with Medieval Spanish Catholicism and the barbarity of modern warfare.
His translation of St. John of the Cross is unparalleled in English:
Upon a gloomy night,
With all my cares to loving ardours flushed,
(O venture of delight!)
With nobody in sight
I went abroad when all the house was hushed.
Or:
I entered in, I know not where,
And I remained, though knowing naught,
Transcending knowledge with my thought…
And Campbell was perhaps the greatest English speaking lyric poet of the twentieth century. The concluding portion of his “Horses on the Camargue” is illustrative:
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 hardship bred,
Spirits of power and beauty and delight
Have ever on such frugal pasture fed
And loved to course with tempests through the night.
He was admired by T. S. Eliot, who published his work, Edith Sitwell, who wrote about him, and by a host of writers and artists of Catholic persuasion, from Father Martin D’Arcy and Wyndham Lewis to Charles Tomlinson and Augustus John.
Displaying 1 of 1 review