Roy Campbell (poet) Quotes (1901-1957)

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Roy Campbell (poet)

About Roy Campbell (poet)

Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell (2 October 1901 – 23 April 1957) was a South African poet, satirist and translator.

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“South Africa, renowned both far and wide
For politics and little else beside.”
Roy Campbell (poet)
“The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss
As intimate as love, as cold as death.”
“Translations (like wives) are seldom strictly faithful if they are in the least attractive.”
“Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction,
Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire.”
“The timeless, surly patience of the serf
That moves the nearest to the naked earth
And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers.”
Roy Campbell (poet)

Quotes About Roy Campbell (poet)

Gain deeper perspective through quotes about Roy Campbell (poet) from others.

Lawrence Durrell on Roy Campbell (poet)

“He made enemies. He was held up as a Fascist by the poets of the Left but since they had already decreed that Plato was a Fascist, this too was something of a compliment. I once heard this wicked Fascist calmly recall that he had to leave South Africa because of the hostility he had aroused by seriously defending the cause of the Blacks in his writings...His reactions were those of a pastoral world in opposition to the industrial capital – the Tentacular City with its literary intrigues devised by the Intellect.”
Roy Campbell (poet)

Wyndham Lewis on Roy Campbell (poet)

“Campbell has not any regulation political bias, I think. He may incline to Franco because he is a catholic, and to the Old Spain rather than the New Spain because he likes bullfights and all the romantic things. But of politics he has none, unless they are such as go with a great antipathy for the English "gentleman" in all his clubmanesque varieties; a great attachment to the back-Veldt of his native South Africa; and a constant desire to identify himself with the roughest and simplest of his fellow-creatures in pub, farm, and bullring. Such politics as go with those predilections and antipathies he has, but it would be difficult to give them a name. He certainly is neither a communist nor a fascist.”
Roy Campbell (poet)

Oswald Mosley on Roy Campbell (poet)

“Roy Campbell was an altogether more robust character, full of he-man postures, bronco-busting and similar exploits; a type which I usually rather suspect, but much in him was genuine.”
Roy Campbell (poet)

Edith Sitwell on Roy Campbell (poet)

“Roy Campbell was one of the very few great poets of our time. His poems are of great stature, and have a giant's strength and power of movement. They have, too, an extraordinary sensuous beauty. Everything is transformed to greatness.”
Roy Campbell (poet)

J. R. R. Tolkien on Roy Campbell (poet)

“Here is a scion of an Ulster prot. family resident in S. Africa, most of whom fought in both wars, who became a Catholic after sheltering the Carmelite fathers in Barcelona — in vain, they were caught & butchered, and R.C. nearly lost his life. But he got the Carmelite archives from the burning library and took them through the Red country...However it is not possible to convey an impression of such a rare character, both a soldier and a poet, and a Christian convert. How unlike the Left – the 'corduroy panzers' who fled to America...”
Roy Campbell (poet)

About Roy Campbell (poet)

Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell (2 October 1901 – 23 April 1957) was a South African poet, satirist and translator.