Alec Derwent Hope (1907-1900) was my first Australian author to be taught. I, like so many others, overlooked Hope despite his canonical standing, and instead gravitated to other writers who were more interested in feminist, decolonial, postcolonial, and postcolonial issues, as well as those with poetry that was postmodern, experimental, or newly modern.
Hope appeared conventional and outdated by comparison.
His most widely anthologised work, Australia (1943), which depicts the earth as a menopausal women, reinforced these assumptions.
She’s the last land, the most emptiest.
Breast cancer in a woman who has changed her life.
The womb remains moist but the inside is dried.
Even if you take into account the time it was written, silence in this poem about Australia’s First Peoples is a problem for some readers. Why bother, in short?
A.D. Hope : A life – Susan Lever, La Trobe University Press
Susan Lever’s captivating biography A.D. Hope A Life encourages us to stop, think and reconsider. Lever, who is well aware of the issues that will be raised by readers, encourages us to revisit Hope’s writings. Lever traces the career, life and achievements of the “grand old professor”, the poet who is all but forgotten, and documents his contributions to Australian literature during the formative postwar period.
One of the things that makes this biography so appealing is its excellent cultural history. Lever’s analysis of Hope’s poetics is even more impressive, as it reveals the poet’s philosophical depth, his formal brilliance, and her impassioned power.
The poetry is the heart of this bio. It fills in the blanks left by, say, embargoed correspondence. The book dramatizes the contradictions of Hope’s existence as a suburban father and husband, as well as poet and professor, radio host for children, savagely critical reviewer and generous mentor.
In the reverse, we can see the contradictions that shape his intellect, passions and views, and how they are reflected in and generated by the poetry. Both the formal structure and content of the poem show this.
Hope’s education at university was erratic: an outstanding undergraduate career in Sydney, followed by a third-class honors degree from Oxford and then teacher training. This period introduced him to Freud and psychology. It also cultivated his interest in languages, philosophy and philology. This period also inspired him to admire 17th and 18th century poets, satirists, and writers like Ben Jonson and Jonathan Swift.
Hope, a lover of the neoclassical tradition of literature, resisted post-romantic forms and modes of his time, such as the free verse and the personal lyric. Instead, he turned to, and advocated, lively discursive forms such as the long narrative poetry, the satire and meditation, or the epistle.
In his 1956 essay The Discursive Mode, he said that these forms allowed “narratives, dramas, arguments, descriptions, and excogitations”. These were forms of thinking.
It is full of darkness, it is sad, but also funny and joyful. It is also disciplined. The poetry, which is a mixture of old forms and styles, is precise, rhymed and metrically-controlled.
Hope’s verses are both thought-provoking and expressive.
He uses his poems to express ideas and ask questions about issues that are still relevant today.
Tell the old men to go back to bed.
They gave us orders, and we are now dead.
(Inscription of a War 1971)
In the case of Hope’s poetry, it is his invocation of and remodelling traditional forms, such as classical, Biblical and Mythical scenes and 17th and 18th century texts, that makes this poetry so modernist.
Darkness and nighttime bawdiness
Lever’s biographical account takes us through Hope’s idyllic Tasmanian childhood to his aging years as “the great panjandrum” of Canberra (in Patrick White resentful words).
Lever’s story is replete with productive antinomies. Ascent into Hell, Observation Car and other childhood poems from The Wandering Islands are haunted with existential dread and darkness.
Observation Car evokes a journey on a train away from home. The poet, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history looking back, is transfixed as the train propels him onwards.
The past can only be guaranteed.
The observation car
As I stood there, watching the landscape shrink away,
Where are we and where exactly are we?
But Observation car also includes images of women that objectify their bodies. This pattern is repeated elsewhere in Hope’s poetry. He was nicknamed “Phallic Alec” for his bawdy verses satires that he wrote during his college years and after, as well as his continued preoccupation with the sexuality.
The Wandering Islands, A.D. Hope’s first collection of poetry (1955).
Even in his most serious and complex poems like The Double Looking Glass, (1963), the gaze of men is still directed at women. The title implies that the double looking glass will reflect many different layers.
Lever does not advocate for anything. Her account convinces us, however, that some of the poems in question dramatise struggles with sexuality, masculinity and desire.
She writes that readers don’t need to search far for patriarchal attitudes or failures in taste to be found in Hope’s poems. But his best works examine sexuality as if the poet himself is struggling to understand it.
Hope’s poems can be read in two ways: both as self-implicated and objectifying. Lever’s account, which does not dwell on gossip but rather emphasizes the significance of Hope’s love affairs to his poetry is a good example.
Lever suggests that Hope’s sensibility was aligned to a group of writers from around the world and in all political parties who believed “that returning to tradition is essential for preserving social stability”. Hope’s image as conservative and outdated is not tarnished by this suggestion, but rather reframed.
The biography also highlights his poetic response to modernity, both in his time and ours.
Hope is always asking himself about the place of poetry in a modern, secular scientific world. Hope, inspired by University of Sydney philosopher John Anderson and his atheism and materialistic scientific philosophy, soon renounced the religiousness of his Presbyterian background. The biography reveals a paradox – in both his poetry and life, Hope sought to reconcile science with spirituality.
Hope’s poetry is like his music: it has its roots in mystery. In his 1972 polyphonic poem, Vivaldi, Bird and Angel, or, Il Cardinello, this is shown:
There is a world beyond the natural laws.
The grooves of the cd move in perfect time.
There is another song that moves to.
No matter where I am, no matter what I do, it seems that I always seem to be somewhere.
Step in the time of that stream without resistance
Though I am a man of reason, I swear to you.
It’s the same song I used to hear as a kid, and I still do.
It sounds clearer with every passing year.
The inner ear is more expansive, more joyful.
Imagine or create something that is beyond my imagination
This sole instrument or choir
My response to the invisible world
Lever’s bio does not raise the issue of whether or not Hope’s poems are Australian. Hope’s disdain for the hackneyed settler stereotypes of bush is also brought to mind.
His modernity is evident in his rejection of parochialism.
Hope’s first poetry book, The Wandering Islands (published late), won him both national and international recognition. Lever’s biographical account reveals the effects of Australia being far from literary centers in London and New York.
Hope’s poetic style is similar to that of many other poets from his era, most notably W.H. Auden.
Lever, unlike some commentators before her, does not claim that Hope’s poetry was inspired by Auden. Her biography confirms that Auden, as well as many of his contemporary poets, was read by Hope.
Hope’s poem is like Auden’s “iceberg verse” and yet unlike it: It is “tidy”, like Auden’s, and is metrically-disciplined and even clinical. But it’s neither “cold”, nor is it “oblique”.
The ability to persist, be able-minded and foresight
Lever’s account shows that despite obstacles, interruptions, and limitations, Hope’s poetry and academic life were interwoven.
Hope’s public lectures, literary essays, teaching, broadcasting and sometimes vexed network, friendships and relationships with literary luminaries (Douglas Stewart and James Macauley), politicians, prime ministers and other political figures put him at the heart of Australian Literature in its cultural heyday.
Susan Lever explains how A.D. Hope’s poetry and life were interwoven. Georgie Greene/Black Inc.
It is shocking that this first biographical work on Hope has been published more than 20 years after Hope’s death. This is an amazing gift, and we are grateful for it, given that literature, let alone Australian Literature, has become a very precarious subject in universities, with little investment from scholars.
To take on a challenging project like this, despite the odds, required perseverance, courage, poise, and a critical eye. Lever’s biography shines because of these qualities. She is clear-eyed about Hope, intelligently sensitive, and shows the life of the poet in all its brilliance and vivacity.
After reading Hope’s biography, I enjoyed and admired her poetry.
A Swallow in the House, a poem written in 1991 that describes an everyday situation in order for it to be relevant today. The transparency of the glass confuses the bird trapped in the house. “The familiar “yielding component” “becomes suddenly a wall”.
So:
Unable to understand why we fell, we dropped bewildered.
What is in my home, and what might be in my century?
What is it about waiting that confuses us? Wait and see.
This poem is a recognition of our presentism.
The poem asks, by pointing out things that are invisible but in plain view, what might we miss in our present-day common sense.
