Reviews for Bloomsbury and beyond

The average rating for Bloomsbury and beyond based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-12-21 00:00:00 Heather Nolan This is a readable and enjoyable book. However it is lightweight, just as the subject of the biography was in my opinion a lightweight poet. Had he not been an outsider in supporting Franco's Spain while almost the entire British literary establishment supported the Republicans, I do not think anyone would remember him today, certainly not the writer of this biography. Joseph Pearce draws a sympathetic picture of this British ultramontane poet but the sympathy seems to originate in the shared politics and religion of poet and biographer and not in a profound appreciation of the poetry. This biography reinforced my opinion that Roy Campbell is impressive as a man of faith but a third class poet, an example of the kind of "mediocre artist" in Nietzsche's quip (in "Beyond Good and Evil"): "behind a remarkable scholar one finds not infrequently a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist quite often- a remarkable man."

Review # 2 was written on 2015-08-31 00:00:00 Bruce Williamson Another review said Campbell was a lightweight poet, but I encourage the reader to google and read some of his work before you file that judgement away. Everything about his work is rich, and furthermore, a mark of greatness, his topics are no less urgent today, as he covers racism, sin, Faith, love, social classes, in each poem telling it like it is in rhymed songs luxuriant in language. His life too was honest and clean. He went against the crowd, and he suffered for it, and never relented his loyalties to his beliefs, to his wife, to his family, to his Church. I would not say he was a better poet than T.S. Eliot, but I believe the two of them, in heaven, have long known who was the braver. This wonderful biography does him justice, by a biographer whose own background gives him the context to appreciate Campbell.