Roy Campbell (Poet)

Roy Campbell
Roy & Mary Campbell (left), Jacob Kramer & Dolores (right). 1920s.
Born	Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell (1901-10-02)October 2, 1901 Durban, Colony of Natal (now in South Africa)
Died	April 23, 1957(1957-04-23) (aged 55) Near Setúbal, Portugal
Occupation	Poet, journalist
Nationality	South African
Ethnicity	White South African
Genre	Poetry
Literary movement	English romantic revival, satire
Notable works	The Flaming Terrapin, Adamastor, Flowering Reeds
Notable awards	Foyle Prize
Spouse	Mary Margaret Garman
Children	Teresa, Anna

Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell, better known as Roy Campbell, (2 October 1901 – 23 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 First and Second World Wars. Campbell's vocal attacks upon the Marxism and Freudianism popular among the British intelligentsia caused him to be a controversial figure during his own lifetime. It has been suggested by some critics and his daughters in their memoirs that his support for Francisco Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War has caused him to be blacklisted from modern poetry anthologies.

In 2009, Roger Scruton wrote, "Campbell wrote vigorous rhyming pentameters, into which he instilled the most prodigious array of images and the most intoxicating draft of life of any poet of the 20th century... He was also a swashbuckling adventurer and a dreamer of dreams. And his life and writings contain so many lessons about the British experience in the 20th century that it is worth revisiting them".

Roy Campbell was born in Durban, Colony of Natal, the fourth child of Dr. Samuel George Campbell, who was the son of Ulster Scots parents, and of his wife Margaret, daughter of James Dunnachie of Glenboig, Lanarkshire, who had married Jean Hendry of Eaglesham. Educated at Durban High School, he counted literature and the outdoor life among his first loves. Campbell, an accomplished horseman and fisherman, became fluent in Zulu. He left the Union of South Africa in December 1918, being sent to Oxford University, where he arrived early in 1919. However, he failed the entrance examination. Reporting this to his father, he took a philosophical stance, telling him that "university lectures interfere very much with my work", which was writing poetry. His verse-writing was stimulated by avid readings in Nietzsche, Darwin, and the English Elizabethan and Romantic poets. Among his early fruitful contacts were William Walton, the Sitwells, and Wyndham Lewis. Campbell wrote verse imitations of T. S. Eliot and Paul Verlaine. He also began to drink heavily, and continued to do so for the rest of his life.