Roy Campbell (poet) - Literary Style

Literary Style

Much of Campbell's verse was satirical in heroic couplets, a form otherwise rare in 20th-century English verse. Rhymed verse was generally his favoured medium. One modern assessment of his poetry is that "he was vigorous in all he wrote, but not distinctly original."

This is Campbell celebrating fertility and sexuality, in Anadyomene (1924):

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.

On the subject of nature, Campbell could produce poetry such as this in his The Zebras (1931):

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.