An English Poetic Rhapsodic Vision of The Spanish Civil War: An Intertextual Analysis of Roy Campbell’s Poetic Oeuvre

This article revisits and re-examines Roy Campbell’s poems inspired by the Spanish Civil War: Flowering Rifle, Talking Bronco and “A Letter from the San Mateo Front”. The studies carried out by Esteban Pujals (1959), Stephen Spender (1980) and Bernd Dietz (1985) reflect the scarcity of research about Campbell’s warlike poems. The methodology used in this article aims to develop a better understanding of Campbell’s war images and literary references to the Spanish conflict, by analysing them in the light of the poet’s own political ideology. Campbell presents a paean to the ‘Nationalist’ leadership and this exaggerated idealising of the rebels and their deeds contrasts with the way he denigrates those in favour of the Republic. The article concludes that this exaggerated feat transforms most of these poetic works into quasi-Manichaean pamphlets resembling more a morality play than a work of modern literature.