Fernández-Morera, Darío & Michael Hanke
“Roy Campbell: Quixote Redivivus”. In: Cervantes in the English Speaking World. (Estudios de literatura 96) Kassel 2005, pp. 181-190.

Among twentieth-century poets, Roy Campbell (1901-1957) has come closest to personifying the paradoxes and virtues which have made Don Quixote immortal. Admired by those who shared his views, vilified by his opponents, he became the bête noire of the South African political establishment when, in the 1920s, he took his stand against racial prejudice. Ten years later he was attacked by the left-wing poets in Britain as a ‘fascist’ when he supported the Spanish Catholics during the Spanish Civil War in Flowering Rifle (1939), and when, more far-sighted than many contemporaries, he denounced Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin alongside Hitler. In the mid-fifties he translated major Spanish verse plays, among them Cervantes’Numantia. He continued to regard Spain as his spiritual home, and Toledo in particular as “this heavenly place which means more than all the world to me”, thus bearing testimony to his conviction that the country of Don Quixote had remained “topical and actual”. The difference between Campbell and Don Quixote was Campbell’s awareness of his precarious position and his willingness to act out a role he had chosen to play.