ROY CAMPBELL’S TURN TO MITHRAS: MODERNISM AND THE CLASSICS

Abstract

In the prose work, Taurine Provence (1932), and in his collection of poems, Mithraic emblems (1936), the South African poet Roy Campbell (1901–1957), heavily influenced by Franz Cumont’s interpretation of Mithraism and its perceived influence on Christian myth and ritual, by Montherlant’s novel Les bestiaires (1926), and by his experience of bullfighting in the south of France and in Spain, uses Greek and Roman mythology, together with Mithraic art and symbols, to explore emotional and spiritual crises in his personal life. In this article, I wish to offer an interpretation of the explicitly Mithraic poems in Mithraic emblems focusing on the nature of his Modernist engagement with the Classical tradition.