Books, Arts & Manners: Who Was Roy Campbell?

The adventurer and romanticist Roy Campbell (1901-57), born in Durban, South Africa, and killed in a car crash in Portugal, is today the most forgotten of the poets who were in their ascendancy between the two World Wars. James Dickey has said that he now and then likes to read the good bad poets, and that Roy Campbell is one of his favorites in this bleak category. But you will not find even the few best of Roy Campbell’s poems in any of the modern anthologies. Edith Sitwell’s The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry (1958) was perhaps the last major exception.

There are any number of reasons for this critical amnesia, but the political motivation outweighs all others: Campbell was simply on the “wrong” side of the Spanish Civil War. Our half-century-later perspective on that bitter rehearsal for World War II reveals just how pernicious both sides were in the struggle for ideological dominance. Nonetheless, the intellectu-aloids of the Left have never forgiven Roy Campbell’s refusal to endorse, in those days, the dawn of a new age.

TM

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Thomas P. McDonnell

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The adventurer and romanticist Roy Campbell (1901-57), born in Durban, South Africa, and killed in a car crash in Portugal, is today the most forgotten of the poets who were in their ascendancy between the two World Wars. James Dickey has said that he now and then likes to read the good bad poets, and that Roy Campbell is one of his favorites in this bleak category. But you will not find even the few best of Roy Campbell’s poems in any of the modern anthologies. Edith Sitwell’s The Atlantic Book of British and American Poetry (1958) was perhaps the last major exception.

There are any number of reasons for this critical amnesia, but the political motivation outweighs all others: Campbell was simply on the “wrong” side of the Spanish Civil War. Our half-century-later perspective on that bitter rehearsal for World War II reveals just how pernicious both sides were in the struggle for ideological dominance. Nonetheless, the intellectu-aloids of the Left have never forgiven Roy Campbell’s refusal to endorse, in those days, the dawn of a new age.