Roy Campbell (poet)

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Roy Campbell
(Left to right) Roy Campbell, Mary Campbell, Jacob Kramer, and Dolores, 1920s
Born	Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell (1901-10-02)2 October 1901 Durban, Colony of Natal, British Empire (present-day South Africa)
Died	23 April 1957(1957-04-23) (aged 55) Setúbal, Portugal
Occupation	Poet, journalist
Genre	Poetry
Literary movement	English romantic revival, satire[1]
Notable works	The Flaming Terrapin, Adamastor, Flowering Reeds
Spouse	Mary Margaret Garman

Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell (2 October 1901 – 23 April 1957), was a South African poet, literary critic, literary translator, war poet and satirist. Most of his adult life was spent in Europe.

Born into a white South African family of Scottish descent in Durban, Colony of Natal, Campbell was sent to England to attend Oxford University. Instead, he failed the entrance exam and drifted into London's literary bohemia. Following his marriage to the bohemian Englishwoman Mary Garman, he wrote the well-received poem The Flaming Terrapin which brought the Campbells into the highest circles of British literature.

After experiencing both shunning and social ostracism for supporting racial equality as the editor of the South African literary magazine Voorslag, Campbell returned to England and became involved with the Bloomsbury Group. He ultimately decided that the Bloomsbury Group was snobbish, promiscuous, nihilistic and anti-Christian. He lampooned them in a mock-epic poem called The Georgiad, which damaged his reputation in literary circles. His subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism in Spain and vocal support for Francisco Franco and the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War caused him to be labelled a fascist by influential left-wing literati, further damaging his reputation as a poet. He served in the British Army during Second World War and briefly attended meetings of The Inklings during this period, where he befriended C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

In the post-war period, Campbell continued to write and translate poetry and to lecture. He also joined other White South African writers and intellectuals, including Laurens van der Post, Alan Paton, and Uys Krige, in speaking out against apartheid. Campbell died in a car accident in Portugal on Easter Monday, 1957.

Though Campbell 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,^[2] the accusation that he was a fascist, which was first promulgated during the 1930s, continues to seriously damage his reception, though some literary critics have attempted to rehabilitate his reputation.