The Hunter and the Dreamer: Roy Campbell’s Literary Personality in Anthony Akerman’s Dark Outsider

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.