Roy Campbell was a highly productive translator, travel writer, and autobiographer. His modern reputation, however, rests chiefly on the fact that he is South Africa's most prolific poet, and that, alone among his South African contemporaries, he drew and has retained international attention as a poet of major significance. It was not merely the undoubted power and originality of his poetry that contributed to his reputation: his physical adventurousness, his flamboyance, and his extreme opinions gave his life, like that of Ernest Hemingway, a vividness of which his writing seemed a part, and few poets have inspired more extreme affection and enmity.

Royston Dunnachie Campbell was born in Natal on 2 October 1901, the third son of Durban's most successful doctor, Sam Campbell. As their name suggests, the family was of Scots origin--Campbell's mother, Margaret, had been born in Scotland--but by the time of the poet's birth they had established...