While living in a small converted stable on the coast of North Wales, Campbell completed his first long poem,
The Flaming Terrapin, a humanistic allegory of the rejuvenation of man projected in episodes. It was published in 1924.
Returning to South Africa in 1925, he started
Voorslag, a literary magazine with the ambition to serve as a "whiplash" (the meaning of the Afrikaans word
voorslag) on South African colonial society, which he considered backwards and inbred. Before the magazine was launched, he invited William Plomer to help with it, and late in the year, Laurens van der Post was invited to become Afrikaans editor of
Voorslag. Campbell lasted as the magazine's editor for three issues but then resigned because of interference from the magazine's proprietor, Lewis Reynolds; Reynolds reacted against Campbell's negative comments about colonial South Africa and informed him that he would remove some of his editorial control over the content of
Voorslag. Campbell moved back to England in 1927. While still in South Africa, he had written
The Wayzgoose, a lampoon, in rhyming couplets, on the cultural shortcomings of South Africa. It was published in 1928.
The Flaming Terrapin had established his reputation as a rising star and was favourably compared to Eliot's recently released poem
The Waste Land. His verse was well received by Eliot himself, Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, and others.
Now moving in literary circles, he was initially on friendly terms with the Bloomsbury Group but then became very hostile to them; he declared that they were sexually promiscuous, snobbish, and anti-Christian.
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."
Referring to the Bloomsbury Group "intellectuals without an intellect," Campbell penned a verse satire of them entitled
The Georgiad (published in 1931). The Campbells moved to Provence in southern France in the early 1930s.
The French period saw the publication of, among other writings,
Adamastor (1930),
Poems (1930),
The Georgiad (1931), and the first version of his autobiography,
Broken Record (1934). Both autobiographies are regarded as unreliable. In 1932, the Campbells retained the Afrikaner poet Uys Krige as tutor to Tess and Anna. During this time he and his wife Mary were slowly being drawn to the Roman Catholic faith, a process which can be traced in a sonnet sequence entitled
Mithraic Emblems (1936).
A fictionalized version of Campbell at this time ("Rob McPhail") appears in the novel
Snooty Baronet by Wyndham Lewis (1932). Campbell's poetry had been published in Lewis' periodical
BLAST; he was reportedly happy to appear in the novel but disappointed that his character was killed off (McPhail was gored while fighting a bull).