After experiencing both shunning and social ostracism for supporting racial equality as the editor of the South African literary magazine Voorslag, Campbell returned to England and became involved with the Bloomsbury Group.

His subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism in Spain and vocal support for Francisco Franco and the Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War caused him to be labelled a fascist by influential left-wing literati, further damaging his reputation as a poet.

Though Campbell was considered by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Edith Sitwell to have been one of the best poets of the period between the First and Second World Wars,[2] the accusation that he was a fascist, which was first promulgated during the 1930s, continues to seriously damage his reception, though some literary critics have attempted to rehabilitate his reputation.

While inside Las Palmas Cathedral, Campbell was shown several holy relics, including the heart of Bishop Juan de Frías, "who sacrificed himself to the protection of the Guanches or natives of the Canaries."

"[25] While attending Greek tutorials, Campbell struck up a friendship with the future classical composer William Walton, who shared his enthusiasm for the poetry of Eliot and the Sitwells, and for the prose writings of Wyndham Lewis.

[47] To escape the notoriety caused by the brawl, Roy and Mary Campbell moved from London to Ty Corn, a small converted stable three miles from the village of Aberdaron in Gwynedd, Wales.

I know of no one living who could write in such a sustained and intense poetical manner... Lots of things might have weighed against my liking it (particularly your philosophy of sweat) but the sheer fecundity of images ravished my lady-like prejudices ... Good luck and ten thousand thanks for such a poem.

The study of modern anthropology should be encouraged as it would give us a better sense of our position in the family tree of Homo sapiens – which is among the lower branches: it might even rouse us to assert ourselves in some less ignoble way than reclining blissfully in a grocer's paradise and feeding on the labour of the natives.

[61] Before leaving South Africa with his family in 1927, Campbell reacted to his ostracism by writing the poem "The Making of a Poet": In every herd there is some restive steer Who leaps the cows and heads each hot stampede, Till the old bulls unite in jealous fear To hunt him from the pastures where they feed.

In comparing our promiscuity and frankness with that of the eighteenth century they will not fail to notice the peculiar absence of zest or enjoyment in its pleasures, and the lack of intellectual or physical vitality, which distinguish the present generation.

Embedded between the attacks on Bertrand Russell, Marie Stopes, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf and a host of other Bloomsbury's and Georgians are classically refined objections to the prevailing philosophy of scepticism, mounted like pearls of wisdom in the basest of metal.

Particularly major influences at this time were Jean-Toussaint Samat [fr]'s French prose translations from the Hunkpapa Lakota poetry of Michawago, a son of Sitting Bull, whom Campbell later praised as, "a very fine poet".

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.

After the atrocities he had witnessed, Campbell was deeply offended by the generally pro-Republican sympathies in Britain, where large numbers of young men were volunteering for the International Brigades and where only British Catholics raised a dissident voice.

Campbell then attempted to enlist in one of the Carlist militias, but was informed by Alfonso Merry del Val, the head of the Nationalist Press Service, that he could better serve as a war correspondent alongside Francisco Franco's armies.

In the heroic couplets of his poem Flowering Rifle, Campbell mocked the combat deaths of Republican soldiers, praised the Nationalist faction for defending the Church, and accused Communists of committing far more heinous atrocities than any Fascist government.

Campbell wrote "a violently polemical preface" and many verse satires in which he lashed out against left-wing poets MacNeice, Spender, Auden, Day-Lewis and MacDiarmid, whom he accused, among other things, of cowardice for refusing to "join up" during the war.

While continuing to struggle with recurring bouts of the malaria he had contracted in British East Africa, Campbell closely befriended several disillusioned Republican veterans of Spanish Civil War, including Hamish Fraser, Hugh Oloff de Wet, and George Orwell.

I could not allow myself to be called a coward by one who during the struggle against fascism had employed no other weapon to the adversary than his own knife and fork and his highly lucrative but innocuous pen – while I was on ranker's pay suffering malaria in the jungle.

[118] On 7 December 1951, Campbell's new memoir Light on a Dark Horse, which his friend Dylan Thomas later dubbed "this often beautiful and always bee-loud autobiography", was published "to a mixed reception, scattered reviews, and disappointing sales.

We are behaving about a quarter as badly as the Zulus and Matabeles did to their fellow Bantu, and it will do us little more good than it did them... and we may end by ranking the majority of the population in violent opposition to the white minority, which happened in the mad revolution in Haiti, when the black Emperor, Jean Christope, out-Caesared Nero and Caligula in the name of Liberty and Equality.

Though practical Bolshevism may be the most diabolical and cruel hook ever inserted into bait ... You can expect a rustic Zulu to be proof against the seductive blarney which completely seduced the 'knowing and sophisticated' intellectuals of England and Western Europe for so many years.

Campbell's audience also listened with mounting horror as he dubbed Winston Churchill "a valiant but superannuated Beefeater," and Franklin Delano Roosevelt "a tittering zombie", for having given Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin during the Yalta Conference.

Campbell also expressed a belief, however, that critics of apartheid were guilty of hypocrisy if they did not also condemn racial segregation and Jim Crow Laws in the American South, where he alleged the racist repression was much worse.

[138] According to his daughter Anna Campbell Lyle: Mary was deeply religious and it was a great happiness to her to know that Father had died two days after receiving the Sacrament on Easter Sunday, so that he was in a State of Grace when his soul left his body.

"[140] This is Campbell celebrating fertility and sexuality, in an extract from The Flaming Terrapin (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.

In his 1982 book, The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans, anti-apartheid South African author Jack Cope praised "the Voorslag Affair", as "one of the most significant moral and intellectual revolts in the country's literary history."

Cope further praised Campbell, William Plomer, and Laurens van der Post, saying, "Their brief but glorious sortie helped to break up the smug and comfy little bushveld camp of colonial English writing which had been sending up its pipe fumes, coffee scents, and smoke screens for a century past.

According to his daughters and his biographer Joseph Pearce, however, Campbell's opposition to the Second Spanish Republic was based on personal experience with both Republican war crimes and with the systematic religious persecution that targeted both the clergy and laity of the Catholic Church in Spain.

[149] Dana Gioia has also written of The Narcissiad, "Formal and satiric, this mock epic in heroic couplets pilloried the excesses of contemporary American poetry by recounting the adventures of Narcissicus, an ambitious but talentless poet.