Abstract

This article considers readings of the life and literary personality of the South African poet Roy Campbell. Drawing on Anthony Akerman’s play about Campbell, Dark Outsider, to support the argument, it argues that readings that limit themselves to the biographical, which tend to foreground his hypermasculine, colonial persona, or the psychological, which read this persona as a mask for a sensitive nature, tend to downplay both the literary influences for, and the contextual nature of, his well-documented self-inventions. This article suggests that these were in tune with the modernist era in which his writing emerged, and drew in particular on the respective influences of the French poet Charles Baudelaire and Campbell’s friend, the artist and writer Percy Wyndham Lewis.

摘要

本文考虑了对南非诗人罗伊·坎贝尔的生平和文学个性的解读。借鉴安东尼·阿克曼关于坎贝尔的戏剧，黑暗局外人，以支持这一论点，它认为将自己限制在传记中的解读倾向于突出他的超男性化、殖民角色或心理，将这个角色解读为一个面具敏感的性质，倾向于淡化他有据可查的自我发明的文学影响和背景性质。这篇文章表明，这些与他的作品出现的现代主义时代相吻合，并特别借鉴了法国诗人查尔斯·波德莱尔和坎贝尔的朋友、艺术家和作家珀西·温德姆·刘易斯各自的影响。