Last week, a subscriber to my poem-a-week idea told me, good naturedly I should add, to get off the female poet kick and offer something from one of the hard hitting males like Kipling or Service. I told him that I have known and loved the poems of both of these men since I was a kid and will get around to them soon enough. But then I got to thinking about what he said, and I decided that this week I would offer up something from Roy Campbell, a great poet whose work I have enjoyed for many years, and one of the roughest characters to ever write poetry.

The dust jacket of my old copy of Campbell's 1952 autobiography," Light on a Dark Horse," describes him thus: "One of England's greatest living lyric poets, soldier, traveler, bull-fighter, horse-trader, circus performer, literary critic . . . hunting game in Rhodesia; fishing for sharks and battling with octopuses; life in a deep-sea whaler; horse-breaking and bull-fighting, treasure-hunting and jousting among the gypsies of the Camargue; romance and poverty in London's literary Bohemia; Spain and the Spanish in the uneasy prelude to the Civil War - these are only some of the many unforgettable impressions of a crowded and exciting story.

Or try this from Russell Kirk, who knew him well: "A faithful lover and a hot hater, a soldier, a sailor, a hunter, a bull-fighter, a horse-breeder, a critic, a translator, a champion of religion, a great brawny Carlyle-hero of a man, a South African and a Scot and a Latin rolled into one gigantic frame, a singer of sea-chanties, a master of pencil-sketching, a High Tory, a great drinker, a great talker, one of the fiercest and kindest beings alive . . It is his power of loving and hating which gives his verse its invariable strength and its frequent splendor. . . shot and slashed and beaten and burned in two terrible wars and various private feuds, his vast barrel-torso is too grim a sight for him to like to appear on a public beach; a piece of plastic substitutes for a bone in one of his legs; his spine has been broken and his eardrums have been shattered; he has been knifed by gypsies in Spain, torpedoed and half drowned in the Hebrides, savaged by beasts in South Africa, clubbed by Communists in Toledo, tossed by bulls in Camargue."

Needless to say, Campbell was also a true conservative: devout, anti-communist, anti-fascist, respectful of traditional moral and social values, distrustful of "progress."

Campbell was born in South Africa, where he learned to speak Zulu almost as soon as he learned English. He attended Oxford, where his stories of his youth in the African bush earned him the nickname "Zulu." His friend Wyndham Lewis modeled the character Zulu Blades in his novel "The Apes of God" after him. When Campbell was 22 he wrote the great, boisterous allegory about the voyage of Noah's arc, "The Flaming Terrapin," a poem that placed him firmly in the ranks of such contemporary greats as T.S. Eliot. In fact, Eliot is said to have regarded him as one of the greatest of modern poets.

In 1931, Campbell published another of his most famous poems, entitled The Georgiad," a lengthy, biting satire and scathing attack on the Bloomsbury group, the avant-garde, decadent, implicitly anti-Christian, culturally subversive, iconoclastic literary set that dominated London's intellectual society from early in the century until the end of World War II.

Needless to say, this won him many powerful enemies, and shortly thereafter he left the country with his wife and two daughters for a life of adventure, a spiritual journey which ended with his conversion to Catholicism, and a narrow escape with his family from Spain, days before the anti-Catholic Republican forces murdered their friends, the Carmelite monks of Toledo.

I have chosen a non-controversial Campbell poem for this week, but one that still reflects the masculine power that runs throughout his poetry. It seems fitting for this time of year and provides, I believe, a good introduction to this great poet. I will return to him and his work again in the near future.