Bloody Horse

Samuel Hynes

  • Roy Campbell: A Critical Biography by Peter Alexander
    Oxford, 277 pp, £12.50, March 1981, ISBN 0 19 211750 5
  • The Selected Poems of Roy Campbell edited by Peter Alexander
    Oxford, 131 pp, £7.50, July 1982, ISBN 0 19 211946 X

Roy Campbell has been dead for twenty-five years, and in that time his reputation, such as it was, has faded almost entirely away (I can quote only one of his poems from memory – the epigram on South African novelists that ends ‘But where’s the bloody horse?’). Campbell is one now of that large, sad category, the Neglected Poets, along with many whom, in his day, he despised: Humbert Wolfe, for example, and Vita Sackville-West and Edward Shanks. Can it be that he belongs in such forgotten company? Is his a just neglect?

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