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Roy Campbell
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.
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, Campbell drifted into London's literary bohemia. Following his marriage to bohemian Mary Garman, Campbell wrote the well-received poem The Flaming Terrapin which brought the Campbells into the highest circles of British literature.
After supporting racial equality during a stay in South Africa as editor of the literary magazine Voorslag, Campbell returned to England and became involved with the Bloomsbury Group. Campbell ultimately decided that the Bloomsbury Group was snobbish, promiscuous, nihilistic, and anti-Christian. Campbell lampooned them in a mock-epic poem called The Georgiad, which damaged Campbell's reputation in literary circles. Campbell's subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism in Spain and vocal support for Francisco Franco and the Nationalists caused him to be labelled a fascist by influential left-wing literati, further damaging his reputation as a poet. Campbell served in the British Army during Second World War. He briefly attended meetings of The Inklings during this period and befriended C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
In the post-war period, Campbell continued to write and translate poetry and lecture. He also joined other White South African writers and intellectuals, including Laurens van der Post, Alan Paton, and Uys Krige, in denouncing apartheid in South Africa. 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, the accusation that he was a fascist, which was first promulgated during the 1930s, continues to seriously damage his reception, though some critics have attempted to rehabilitate his reputation.
Source: Wikipedia