Poet Out of His Age

Roy Campbell, born into greater ages of the past, would have ridden beside Lancelot or died with Roland; born into the greater ages that may come when we have buried the last positivist, he would have sung purely of blazing colors and noble energies. Condemned to this age of sex-obsessed eunuchs who negate love and blind men who deny the rainbow, he was fretted into noble rages that sometimes marred his purer poetry. Yet even amid the alien corn of today, he wrote, as this volume of his Collected Poems (Regnery, $6.50) attests, some deathless poems—poems too great for our petty critics even to see.

Campbell’s greatest poetry, which will live when our bards of shreds and patches are rags in the wind, came early. He was a South African, warmed by fiercer suns, splendidly savage with the land of elephant and leopard. There was in him that central fire that keeps earth’s heart still a star: out of that star-fire his poems leaped like elemental jets of lava. The Flaming Terrapin (his first book) dared to fuse, in modern terms and a fiercer soul, the rainbows that ran on the palette of Keats. It is a song of living beasts and singing colors, which all who love life ever love. Its hot splendors daunt, dismay and transcend the lap-dog critics of today. That book, unfortunately, is not represented in this volume.

ER

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E. Merrill Root

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Roy Campbell, born into greater ages of the past, would have ridden beside Lancelot or died with Roland; born into the greater ages that may come when we have buried the last positivist, he would have sung purely of blazing colors and noble energies. Condemned to this age of sex-obsessed eunuchs who negate love and blind men who deny the rainbow, he was fretted into noble rages that sometimes marred his purer poetry. Yet even amid the alien corn of today, he wrote, as this volume of his Collected Poems (Regnery, $6.50) attests, some deathless poems—poems too great for our petty critics even to see.

Campbell’s greatest poetry, which will live when our bards of shreds and patches are rags in the wind, came early. He was a South African, warmed by fiercer suns, splendidly savage with the land of elephant and leopard. There was in him that central fire that keeps earth’s heart still a star: out of that star-fire his poems leaped like elemental jets of lava. The Flaming Terrapin (his first book) dared to fuse, in modern terms and a fiercer soul, the rainbows that ran on the palette of Keats. It is a song of living beasts and singing colors, which all who love life ever love. Its hot splendors daunt, dismay and transcend the lap-dog critics of today. That book, unfortunately, is not represented in this volume.