Campbell, Roy

Campbell, Roy, 1901–57, South African poet and satirist. After some time in England and France Campbell returned to South Africa to edit Voorslag [Whiplash], a satirical magazine, publishing works such as The Flaming Terrapin (1924) and The Georgiad (1931), an attack on the Bloomsbury group. In the 1930s, after a conversion to Roman Catholicism, Campbell turned to heroic poetry as in Mithraic Emblems (1936). Campbell's enthusiasm for Franco during the Spanish Civil War, expressed in Flowering Rifle (1939), has long interfered with an unbiased assessment of his work. He served with the British army in both world wars. His collected poems were published in 1957.

See the two volumes of his autobiography (1934, 1952) and biography by P. Alexander (1982).

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