Roy Campbell: Hero or Villain?

Resumo

Roy Campbell was a South African poet whose literary production was mostly published between the First and the Second World Wars. According to T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell, Campbell was one of the best British poets of the 20th century but his strong character, his original South-African condition and, above all, his Spanish Catholic conversion in 1935 and support to Nationalists´ Spanish moral and values during the Spanish Civil War led him to collect a wide range of detractors and literary enemies in those countries he chose to live despite his efforts to get used to the local or national customs by going native. His poetic collections are a good example that can undoubtedly prove how literature can be defined by politics or religion rather than by any writer´s praised talent. Roy Campbell did not write for or from the Left and, so, he was blacklisted from present anthologies in English. Though a physically tough man, he was one of the humblest and kindest literary figures who loved any artistic expression of his highly varied surroundings he always tried to portray through impressive and vigorous verses in a poetry full of prodigious images.