Roy Campbell (poet)

"South Africa, renowned both far and wide For politics and little else beside."

"The City of Giraffes!—a People Who live between the earth and skies, Each in his lone religious steeple, Keeping a light-house with his eyes."

"Translations (like wives) are seldom strictly faithful if they are in the least attractive."

"I love to see, when leaves depart, The clear anatomy arrive, Winter, the paragon of art, That kills all forms of life and feeling Save what is pure and will survive."

"Our spirits leaped, hosannas of destruction, Like desert lilies forked with tongues of fire."

"The frost stings sweetly with a burning kiss As intimate as love, as cold as death."

"The timeless, surly patience of the serf That moves the nearest to the naked earth And ploughs down palaces, and thrones, and towers."

"We shall not meet again: over the wave Our ways divide, and yours is straight and endless – But mine is short and crooked to the grave: Yet what of these dark crowds, amid whose flow I battle like a rock, aloof and friendless – Are not their generations, vague and endless, The waves, the strides, the feet on which I go?"

"With white tails smoking free, Long streaming manes, and arching necks, they show Their kinship to their sisters of the sea – And forward hurl their thunderbolts of snow. Still out of hardships bred, Spirits of power and beauty and delight Have ever on such frugal pastures fed And loved to course with tempests through the night."

"Of all the clever people round me here I most delight in Me – Mine is the only voice I care to hear, And mine the only face I like to see."

"You praise the firm restraint with which they write – I'm with you there, of course: They use the snaffle and the curb all right, But where's the bloody horse?"

"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."

"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 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 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."

"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..."