"Learning that his wife had been conducting a passionate affair with Vita (to the enraged jealousy of Vita’s other lover, Virginia Woolf), Campbell began to see the three aspects of the new elite...sexual inversion, anti-patriotism, and progressive politics...as aspects of a single frame of mind. These three qualities amounted, for Campbell, to a refusal to grow up. The new elite, in Campbell’s opinion, lived as bloodless parasites on their social inferiors and moral betters; they jettisoned real responsibilities in favor of utopian fantasies and flattered themselves that their precious sensibilities were signs of moral refinement, rather than the marks of a fastidious narcissism. The role of the poet is not to join their Peter Pan games but to look beneath such frolics for the source of spiritual renewal."

"In March 1936 the anti-clerical contagion spreading across Spain reached the streets of Toledo, the ancient city in which the Campbells had made their home. Churches were burned in a series of violent riots in which priests and nuns were attacked. During these bloody disturbances, Roy and Mary Campbell sheltered in their house several of the Carmelite monks from the neighboring monastery. In the following weeks, the situation worsened. Portraits of Marx and Lenin were posted on every street corner, and horrific tales began to filter in from surrounding villages of priests being shot and wealthy men being butchered in front of their families. Toledo's beleagured Christians braced themselves for the next wave of persecution, and the Campbells, in an atmosphere that must have seemed eerily reminiscent of early Christians in the Catacombs of Rome, were confirmed in a secret ceremony, before dawn, by Cardinal Goma, the elderly Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain. In July 1936, the civil war erupted onto the streets of Toledo, heralded by the arrival in the city of Communist militiamen from Madrid. With no one to defend them, the priests, monks, and nuns fell prey to the hatred of their adversaries. The seventeen monks from the Carmelite monastery were rounded up, herded on to the street and shot. Campbell discovered their murdered bodies, left lying where they fell. He also discovered the bodies of other priests lying in the narrow street where the priests had been murdered. Swarms of flies surrounded their bodies, and scrawled in their blood on the wall was written, 'Thus strikes the CHEKA.'"

"Having witnessed the cold-blooded murder of his friends and acquaintances, it was not likely that Campbell was going to support the cause of the perpetrators. Bearing these horrific facts in mind, it is clearly a gross oversimplification to dismiss Campbell's stance in the Spanish Civil War as evidence that he was a Fascist. Such an obvious mitigating circumstance was, however, almost universally overlooked by Campbell's detractors in England, all of whom appended the 'Fascist' label to his person, employing it, and the accompanying stereotypical effluvia with which such an epithet is associated, with the cynical glee of seasoned character assassins."

"More people have been imprisoned for Liberty, humiliated and tortured for Equality, and slaughtered for Fraternity in this century, than for any less hypocritical motives, during the Middle Ages."

Franco has made no more horrible shambles

Than this poem of Campbell's

The foulest outrage his breed has to show

Since the massacre of Glencoe!

--Who cares

Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?

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 [...]

But hatred of our church is after all the real only final foundation of the C[hurch] of E[ngland] ... so deep laid that it remains even when all the superstructure seems removed (C.S.L. for instance reveres the Blessed Sacrament, and admires nuns!). Yet if a Lutheran is put in jail he is up in arms; but if Catholic priests are slaughtered ... he disbelieves it (and I daresay really thinks they asked for it).

Dinner, most ancient of the Georgian rites,

The noisy prelude of loquacious nights,

At the mere noise of whose unholy gong

The wagging tongue feels resolute and strong,

Senate of bores and parliament of fools,

Where gossip in her native empire rules;

What doleful memories the word suggests -'

When I have sat like Job among the guests,

Sandwiched between two bores, a hapless prey,

Chained to may chair, and cannot get away,

Longing, without the appetite to eat,

To fill my ears, more than my mouth, with meat,

And stuff my eardrums full of fish and bread

Against the din to wad my dizzy head:

When I have watched each mouthful that they poke

Between their jaws, and praying they might choke,

Found the descending lump but cleared the way

For further anecdotes and more to say.

O Dinners! take my curse upon you all,

But literary dinners most of all...

Maternal Earth stirs redly from beneath

Her blue sea-blanket and her quilt of sky,

A giant Anadyomene from the sheath

And chrysalis of darkness; till we spy

Her vast barbaric haunches, furred with trees,

Stretched on the continents, and see her hair

Combed in a surf of fire along the breeze

To curl about the dim sierras, where

Faint snow-peaks catch the sun's far-swivelled beams:

And, tinder to his rays, the mountain-streams

Kindle, and volleying with a thunderstroke

Out of their roaring gullies, burst in smoke

To shred themselves as fine as women's hair,

And hoop gay rainbows on the sunlit air.

From the dark woods that breathe of fallen showers,

Harnessed with level rays in golden reins,

The zebras draw the dawn across the plains

Wading knee-deep among the scarlet flowers.

The sunlight, zithering their flanks with fire,

Flashes between the shadows as they pass

Barred with electric tremors through the grass

Like wind along the gold strings of a lyre.

Into the flushed air snorting rosy plumes

That smoulder round their feet in drifting fumes,

With dove-like voices call the distant fillies,

While round the herds the stallion wheels his flight,

Engine of beauty volted with delight,

To roll his mare among the trampled lilies.

• The Flaming Terrapin. (1924).
• Voorslag. (1926—1927). A monthly magazine edited by Roy Campbell, et al.
• The Wayzgoose: A South African Satire. (1928).
• Adamastor. (1930).
• Poems. (1930).
• The Gum Trees. (1931).
• The Georgiad - A Satirical Fantasy in Verse. (1931).
• Taurine Provence. (1932).
• Pomegranates. (1932).
• Burns. (1932).
• Flowering Reeds. (1933).
• Broken Record. (1934).
• Mithraic Emblems. (1936).
• Flowering Rifle: A Poem from the Battlefield of Spain. (1936).
• Sons of the mistral. (1938).
• Talking Bronco. (1946).
• Poems of Baudelaire: A Translation of Les Fleurs du Mal. (1946).
• Light on a Dark Horse: An Autobiography. (1952).
• Lorca. (1952).
• The Mamba's Precipice. (1953) (Children's story).
• Nativity. (1954).
• Portugal. (1957).
• Wyndham Lewis. (1985).

Books about Roy Campbell