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Roy Campbell ( 2 October 1901 – 22 April 1957 ) 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 two World Wars , but his connections to Right-wing ideology have impaired his reputation and any unbiased assessments of his writing. A willingness to make bitter enemies of influential Literati also helped consign him to the outskirts of literature. As of 2006, his life and works--both singularly colorful--are little-known and overdue for re-examination. EARLY LIFE Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, was born in Durban , South Africa, the son of Dr. Samuel George Campbell. Educated at Durban High School, he counted literature and the outdoor life among his first loves. Campbell was an accomplished horseman and fisherman and he also became fluent in Zulu . He left South Africa in 1918 intending to Matriculate at Oxford University but he never did, yet his intellectual life bloomed in the university city. Campbell wrote verse imitations of T.S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine , and later met Eliot, Dylan Thomas, the Sitwells, and Wyndham Lewis . He published his first collection of poems ''The Flaming Terrapin'' in 1924 when he was just twenty-two. POET AND SATIRIST ''The Flaming Terrapin'' established his reputation as a rising star and was favorably compared to the recently released poem of Eliot's '' The Waste Land ''. His verse was critically well-received by Eliot himself, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, and others. Now moving in the literary set, he criticized the Bloomsbury Group whom he thought sexually promiscuous, snobbish, and anti-Christian. Calling them "intellectuals without intellect," he penned a satire entitled ''The Georgiad'' (published in 1931) that was a scathing attack on them. His wife’s alleged affair with Vita Sackville-West (who was the lover of Virginia Woolf ) was a contributing cause to this. Returning to South Africa, he started ''Voorslag'', a literary magazine along with William Plomer and Laurens Van Der Post , which promoted a more racially integrated South Africa; it lasted for three issues before being forced to shut down because of its radical views. However, he found the local cultural scene to be too introspective. After publishing the satirical poem ''The Wayzgoose'' 1928 he moved to southern France . The French period saw the publication of ''Adamastor'' (1930), ''Poems'' (1930), ''The Georgiad'' (1931), and the first volume of his autobiography ''Broken Record'' (1934) among others. During this time he and his wife Mary were slowly being drawn to the Catholic faith, which can be traced in a sonnet sequence entitled '' Mithraic Emblems'' (1936). FRANCO, THE SECOND WORLD WAR, CAMPBELL'S CHANGED REPUTATION Moving on to Spain , he and his family converted to Catholicism in the small Spanish village of Altea in 1935. His reputation as a poet suffered considerably when he sided with General Francisco Franco and fought alongside the Nationalist Army during the Spanish Civil War , at a time when most Western artists and intellectuals sided with the Republicans. For an author to support Franco in this era was unusual, as was Campbell's glorification of military strength and masculine virtues. He had also been a strong opponent of Communism for some time and fighting it may have been a strong motivation. The authors who supported the Republicans also tended to be like the ones he mocked in his previous life as a poet, but whether this is relational is uncertain. His role in the war harmed the later reviews and analysis of his work. Although he enlisted in the British Army ,(rising to the rank of Sergeant ) and fought against the Fascists during the Second World War , his reputation remains clouded. POST-WAR LIFE AND WORKS Campbell was invalided out of the army in 1944. He subsequently moved to Portugal in 1952. Although Estado Novo was not precisely fascist, emigrating to it after the war may have enhanced or exaggerated the image he had developed. Or it could be said to have clarified it, as the dictator Salazar's regime was more like traditionalist Catholic Authoritarianism -- which is perhaps more in line with what he envisioned than Franco's rule. In any event, in Portugal he wrote the second volume of his autobiography ''Light on a Dark Horse''. Campbell's conversion to Catholicism inspired him to write what some consider to be the finest spiritual verse of his generation. He translated the mystical poems of St. John Of The Cross and documented his conversion in verse in ''Mithraic Emblems''. He also wrote travel guides and children's literature. He also began translating poets from languages such as Spanish and French. Some of his translations of Baudelaire have been published in anthologies. Campbell, by now a self-styled " Dark Horse ," produced what may be the most idiomatically sensitive translations into English of the Spanish martyr-poet Federico García Lorca , who was killed by Nationalist-associated fanatics at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The happy union of the gay and left-leaning Lorca and his rightist, ultra-macho translator--they never met-- is a fascinating challenge for any student of modernist poems. Roy Campbell died in a car accident near Setúbal , Portugal on Easter Monday , 1957. SELECTED WORKS BY CAMPBELL
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