Page "Roy Campbell (poet)" Paragraph 8

According to Roger Scruton, " Learning that his wife had been conducting a passionate affair with Vita ( to the enraged jealousy of Vita ’ s other lover, Virginia Woolf ), Campbell began to see the three aspects of the new elite — sexual inversion, anti-patriotism, and progressive politics — as aspects of a single frame of mind.

These three qualities amounted, for Campbell, to a refusal to grow up.

The new elite, in Campbell ’ s opinion, lived as bloodless parasites on their social inferiors and moral betters ; they jettisoned real responsibilities in favor of utopian fantasies and flattered themselves that their precious sensibilities were signs of moral refinement, rather than the marks of a fastidious narcissism.

The role of the poet is not to join their Peter Pan games but to look beneath such frolics for the source of spiritual renewal.