A. D. Hope
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(1907-2000), born Cooma, NSW, the son of a Presbyterian minister, spent most of his childhood in rural NSW and Tasmania. He graduated in 1928 from the University of Sydney, and took up a scholarship at Oxford the same year. Returning to a depressed Australia in 1931, he tried various occupations before becoming lecturer in education at Sydney Teachers' College in 1937, lecturer in English there 1938-44, moved to the University of Melbourne in 1945 and in 1951 was appointed to the chair of English at Canberra University College, later part of the ANU. He retired in 1968 to devote himself to poetry, but has continued to lecture and retains a close association with the University as emeritus professor.
Although Hope recognised his poetic vocation early, his work appeared only fugitively until 1955 when his first collection, The Wandering Islands, was published. His subsequent collections include Poems (1960), A.D. Hope (1963), Collected Poems 1930-1965 (1966, republished in an expanded form 1972), Selected Poems (1973), A Late Picking (1975), A Book of Answers (1978), The Drifting Continent (1979), Antechinus (1981), The Tragical History of Dr Faustus (1982), The Age of Reason (1985), Selected Poems, selected by Ruth Morse (1986), Orpheus (1991), a volume in the Poets on Record series (1972), a lengthy mock-heroic poem, Dunciad Minor (q.v., 1970), a play, Ladies from the Sea (1987), Selected Poems, selected by David Brooks (1992), and a collection of reminiscences, Chance Encounters (1992). A selection of his verse has been translated into Italian by G. Distefano, titled Tre Volti Dell'Amore (1983). A major figure in Australian critical work since the late 1940s, he has published several collections of essays: The Cave and the Spring (1965), Native Companions (1974), The Pack of Autolycus (1978) and The New Cratylus (1979); a study of Judith Wright (1975); a brief survey of Australian literature 1950-62 (1963); a scholarly, imaginative study of a sixteenth-century poem by William Dunbar, A Midsummer Eve's Dream (1970); and a variety of smaller monographs on aspects of literature. The international recognition that Hope's poetry has won is reflected in the diversity of his awards which include, among others, the Britanica-Australia Award (1965), the Arts Council Award for poetry (1965), the Age Book of the Year Award (1976), the Myer Award (1967), the Levinson Prize for poetry (Chicago, 1968), the Ingram Merrill Award, New York (1969), the Robert Frost Award (1976) and a special NSW State Literary Award (1989). He was made OBE in 1972 and AC in 1981. He has received an honorary D.Litt. from the ANU and the universities of Melbourne and New England as well as Monash University.
The distinctive note of Hope's poetry, authoritative, measured, rich in literary, biblical and mythological allusion and adhering to traditional rhythms and forms, led to his being classed at first as 'classic', 'academic' or 'intellectual'. The lack of any identifiable Australian experience, the satirical dismissal of much of modern life, the diversity of his interests and the emphasis on sexual experience bewildered most early readers. Many saw him as principally a satirist, opposed to the cowardice of technocratic man in preferring tame, vicarious, standardised experience. Certainly, rejection of conforming rituals which stifle life's resources of heroism and energy was, and is, a characteristic theme of Hope's verse. Poems such as 'Private Dick', 'The Brides', 'The House of God' and 'Conquistador' are hilarious treatments of the subject; others such as 'A Commination', 'Easter Hymn' and 'Toast for a Golden Age' are more bitter. But, as The Wandering Islands and the later collections reveal, satire is secondary in Hope's work and springs from his persistent concern with the nature of poetry and the serious, even sacred role that he accords it. As his fine poem 'William Butler Yeats' illustrates, he shares Yeats's romantic, heroic conception of the artist. In 'Invocation' he unequivocally describes the poet as one who 'alone' defends 'That darkness out of which our light is won' and celebrates the working of 'the spirit elect' in his own poetry; and in several other poems he has dealt explicitly with the elect role of the poet. Poetry's complementary communal role emerges in his perception of it as 'Celebration', meaning not just 'admiration and delight' but 'an intellectual assent to the causes that make the natural world an order and a system, and an imaginative grasp of the necessity of its processes'. In essays and poems he has described the poet as one with the gift of night-time vision in a world where others see only by day, and as 'a man continually obsessed with a passion for a synoptic view', concerned always to present his subject, man in all aspects, 'under the aspect of eternity'. The poem 'Conversation with Calliope' and the essay 'The Three Faces of Love' define his conception of the poet's distinctive 'creative way of life', bringing 'new objects of desire into being'.
Hope also sees mythology as playing an indispensable part in this creative reinterpretation; myths embody 'the great commonplaces' that define man's place in the universal order. Yet, as 'An Epistle from Holofernes' affirms, 'myths will not fit us ready made' and 'It is the meaning of the poet's trade/ To recreate the fables and revive/ In men the energies by which they live'. Frequently he refashions myth for his own purposes: 'Imperial Adam' and 'Paradise Saved' deal playfully with the Edenic myth; 'The End of a Journey' casts a new, bleak light on Ulysses' homecoming; 'The Return of Persephone' elicits sympathy for Dis; and in 'Coup de Grâce' even the story of Red Riding Hood is given an unexpected twist.
If Hope confidently sees the poet's task as sacred, he also presents it as hazardous, painful and even terrifying. In much of his verse regularity of form contrasts with strong emotional content, sensuality with intellectual detachment, but within some poems there is a struggle between opposites that is left unreconciled. Poems such as 'Flower Poem' and 'The Watcher', expressive of the terrors and pain of poetic vision, are balanced by others such as 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' and 'As Well as They Can', which establish an emotional poise between suffering and achieved insight. Similarly, poems such as 'X-Ray Photograph', 'The Dinner' and 'Rawhead and Bloody Bones', testifying to the horrors of the mind's imaginings, are balanced by others such as 'Argolis', 'The Trophy' and 'On an Engraving by Casserius', which express a more harmonious acceptance of life's dualities. In his essays Hope has expressed his conviction of the poet's negative capability, and some of his finest poems are also his most impersonal: 'The Death of the Bird', 'Man Friday', 'Meditation on a Bone', 'Moschus Moschiferus' and 'On an Engraving by Casserius'. Other striking achievements include 'The Double Looking Glass', a complex, ornate, richly sensual poem, and the simpler 'Ode on the Death of Pius the Twelfth', which celebrates his mature, joyful intuition of a harmonious natural order.
The characteristic duality of his perceptions, both in terms of harmony and ambivalence, is particularly evident in his love poetry. Love is central to his work, and he has not only frequently drawn analogies between the transcending, creative experience of love and that of poetry but also expressed their interdependence. 'Chorale', 'The Gateway' and 'The Lamp and the Jar' are his most explicit celebrations of this dependence. Others such as 'Pygmalion', 'The Coasts of Cerigo', 'Fafnir', 'The Damnation of Byron' and 'The Dinner' are more ambivalent expressions of the conflicting pull of delight and revulsion, surrender and freedom.
Most of Hope's discursive critical work reflects his preoccupations as a poet. Witty, original and incisive, his essays in The Cave and The Spring, The New Cratylus and The Pack of Autolycus develop his ideas on the nature and forms of poetry, including an energetic defence of rhyme and poetic modes that have fallen into disuse. Regarding poetry as a damaged 'ecology' of forms, he particularly laments the passing of that 'middle form of poetry' successfully resurrected in much of his own verse. As a trenchant, individual, witty reviewer and unrelenting enemy of the secondrate, he has had a strong influence on Australian critical standards and has often been notoriously and valuably unsettling. Native Companions reprints some of his essays and reviews written over four decades. Chance Encounters recalls incidents from his youth in Tasmania to his years of retirement from academic life. Hope's poetry is the subject of numerous critical essays and of monographs by Leonie Kramer (1979) and Kevin Hart (1992). A bibliography, compiled by Joy Hooton, was published in 1979.
Although Hope recognised his poetic vocation early, his work appeared only fugitively until 1955 when his first collection, The Wandering Islands, was published. His subsequent collections include Poems (1960), A.D. Hope (1963), Collected Poems 1930-1965 (1966, republished in an expanded form 1972), Selected Poems (1973), A Late Picking (1975), A Book of Answers (1978), The Drifting Continent (1979), Antechinus (1981), The Tragical History of Dr Faustus (1982), The Age of Reason (1985), Selected Poems, selected by Ruth Morse (1986), Orpheus (1991), a volume in the Poets on Record series (1972), a lengthy mock-heroic poem, Dunciad Minor (q.v., 1970), a play, Ladies from the Sea (1987), Selected Poems, selected by David Brooks (1992), and a collection of reminiscences, Chance Encounters (1992). A selection of his verse has been translated into Italian by G. Distefano, titled Tre Volti Dell'Amore (1983). A major figure in Australian critical work since the late 1940s, he has published several collections of essays: The Cave and the Spring (1965), Native Companions (1974), The Pack of Autolycus (1978) and The New Cratylus (1979); a study of Judith Wright (1975); a brief survey of Australian literature 1950-62 (1963); a scholarly, imaginative study of a sixteenth-century poem by William Dunbar, A Midsummer Eve's Dream (1970); and a variety of smaller monographs on aspects of literature. The international recognition that Hope's poetry has won is reflected in the diversity of his awards which include, among others, the Britanica-Australia Award (1965), the Arts Council Award for poetry (1965), the Age Book of the Year Award (1976), the Myer Award (1967), the Levinson Prize for poetry (Chicago, 1968), the Ingram Merrill Award, New York (1969), the Robert Frost Award (1976) and a special NSW State Literary Award (1989). He was made OBE in 1972 and AC in 1981. He has received an honorary D.Litt. from the ANU and the universities of Melbourne and New England as well as Monash University.
The distinctive note of Hope's poetry, authoritative, measured, rich in literary, biblical and mythological allusion and adhering to traditional rhythms and forms, led to his being classed at first as 'classic', 'academic' or 'intellectual'. The lack of any identifiable Australian experience, the satirical dismissal of much of modern life, the diversity of his interests and the emphasis on sexual experience bewildered most early readers. Many saw him as principally a satirist, opposed to the cowardice of technocratic man in preferring tame, vicarious, standardised experience. Certainly, rejection of conforming rituals which stifle life's resources of heroism and energy was, and is, a characteristic theme of Hope's verse. Poems such as 'Private Dick', 'The Brides', 'The House of God' and 'Conquistador' are hilarious treatments of the subject; others such as 'A Commination', 'Easter Hymn' and 'Toast for a Golden Age' are more bitter. But, as The Wandering Islands and the later collections reveal, satire is secondary in Hope's work and springs from his persistent concern with the nature of poetry and the serious, even sacred role that he accords it. As his fine poem 'William Butler Yeats' illustrates, he shares Yeats's romantic, heroic conception of the artist. In 'Invocation' he unequivocally describes the poet as one who 'alone' defends 'That darkness out of which our light is won' and celebrates the working of 'the spirit elect' in his own poetry; and in several other poems he has dealt explicitly with the elect role of the poet. Poetry's complementary communal role emerges in his perception of it as 'Celebration', meaning not just 'admiration and delight' but 'an intellectual assent to the causes that make the natural world an order and a system, and an imaginative grasp of the necessity of its processes'. In essays and poems he has described the poet as one with the gift of night-time vision in a world where others see only by day, and as 'a man continually obsessed with a passion for a synoptic view', concerned always to present his subject, man in all aspects, 'under the aspect of eternity'. The poem 'Conversation with Calliope' and the essay 'The Three Faces of Love' define his conception of the poet's distinctive 'creative way of life', bringing 'new objects of desire into being'.
Hope also sees mythology as playing an indispensable part in this creative reinterpretation; myths embody 'the great commonplaces' that define man's place in the universal order. Yet, as 'An Epistle from Holofernes' affirms, 'myths will not fit us ready made' and 'It is the meaning of the poet's trade/ To recreate the fables and revive/ In men the energies by which they live'. Frequently he refashions myth for his own purposes: 'Imperial Adam' and 'Paradise Saved' deal playfully with the Edenic myth; 'The End of a Journey' casts a new, bleak light on Ulysses' homecoming; 'The Return of Persephone' elicits sympathy for Dis; and in 'Coup de Grâce' even the story of Red Riding Hood is given an unexpected twist.
If Hope confidently sees the poet's task as sacred, he also presents it as hazardous, painful and even terrifying. In much of his verse regularity of form contrasts with strong emotional content, sensuality with intellectual detachment, but within some poems there is a struggle between opposites that is left unreconciled. Poems such as 'Flower Poem' and 'The Watcher', expressive of the terrors and pain of poetic vision, are balanced by others such as 'Pseudodoxia Epidemica' and 'As Well as They Can', which establish an emotional poise between suffering and achieved insight. Similarly, poems such as 'X-Ray Photograph', 'The Dinner' and 'Rawhead and Bloody Bones', testifying to the horrors of the mind's imaginings, are balanced by others such as 'Argolis', 'The Trophy' and 'On an Engraving by Casserius', which express a more harmonious acceptance of life's dualities. In his essays Hope has expressed his conviction of the poet's negative capability, and some of his finest poems are also his most impersonal: 'The Death of the Bird', 'Man Friday', 'Meditation on a Bone', 'Moschus Moschiferus' and 'On an Engraving by Casserius'. Other striking achievements include 'The Double Looking Glass', a complex, ornate, richly sensual poem, and the simpler 'Ode on the Death of Pius the Twelfth', which celebrates his mature, joyful intuition of a harmonious natural order.
The characteristic duality of his perceptions, both in terms of harmony and ambivalence, is particularly evident in his love poetry. Love is central to his work, and he has not only frequently drawn analogies between the transcending, creative experience of love and that of poetry but also expressed their interdependence. 'Chorale', 'The Gateway' and 'The Lamp and the Jar' are his most explicit celebrations of this dependence. Others such as 'Pygmalion', 'The Coasts of Cerigo', 'Fafnir', 'The Damnation of Byron' and 'The Dinner' are more ambivalent expressions of the conflicting pull of delight and revulsion, surrender and freedom.
Most of Hope's discursive critical work reflects his preoccupations as a poet. Witty, original and incisive, his essays in The Cave and The Spring, The New Cratylus and The Pack of Autolycus develop his ideas on the nature and forms of poetry, including an energetic defence of rhyme and poetic modes that have fallen into disuse. Regarding poetry as a damaged 'ecology' of forms, he particularly laments the passing of that 'middle form of poetry' successfully resurrected in much of his own verse. As a trenchant, individual, witty reviewer and unrelenting enemy of the secondrate, he has had a strong influence on Australian critical standards and has often been notoriously and valuably unsettling. Native Companions reprints some of his essays and reviews written over four decades. Chance Encounters recalls incidents from his youth in Tasmania to his years of retirement from academic life. Hope's poetry is the subject of numerous critical essays and of monographs by Leonie Kramer (1979) and Kevin Hart (1992). A bibliography, compiled by Joy Hooton, was published in 1979.
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A. D. Hope
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A. D. Hope
| A. D. Hope | |
|---|---|
| Born | Alec Derwent Hope 21 July 1907 Cooma, New South Wales |
| Died | 13 July 2000 (aged 92) Canberra, Australian Capital Territory |
| Occupation | Poet and essayist |
| Spouse | Penelope Robinson |
Alec Derwent Hope AC OBE (21 July 1907 –13 July 2000) was an Australian poet and essayist known for his satirical slant. He was also a critic, teacher and academic.
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Contents
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Life
Hope was born in Cooma, New South Wales, and educated partly at home and in Tasmania. He attended Fort Street Boys High School, Sydney University, and then the University of Oxford on a scholarship. Returning to Australia in 1931 he then trained as a teacher, and spent some time drifting. He worked as a psychologist with the New South Wales Department of Labour and Industry, and as a lecturer in Education and English at Sydney Teachers College (1937–44).
He was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne from 1945 to 1950, and in 1951 took the post as the first professor of English at the newly-founded Canberra University College, later of the Australian National University (ANU) when the two institutions merged, a chair he held until retiring in 1968. From 1968 was appointed Emeritus Professor at the ANU.[1]
He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1972[2] and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1981[3] and awarded many other honours. He died in Canberra, having suffered dementia in his last years, and is buried at the Queanbeyan Lawn Cemetery.
Poet and critic
Although he was published as a poet while still young, The Wandering Islands (1955) was his first collection, what remained of his early work after it was mostly destroyed in manuscript in a fire. Its publication was also delayed by concern about the effects of Hope's highly-erotic and savagely-satirical verse on the Australian public. His influences were Pope and the Augustan poets, Auden, and Yeats; he was a polymath, very largely self-taught, and with a talent for offending his countrymen. He wrote a book of "answers" to other poems, including one in response to the poem "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell.
The reviews he wrote in the 1940s and 50s were feared "for their acidity and intelligence. If his reviews hurt some writers - Patrick White included - they also sharply raised the standard of literary discussion in Australia."[4] However, Hope relaxed in later years. As poet Kevin Hart writes, "The man I knew, from 1973 to 2000, was invariably gracious and benevolent".[4]
Hope wrote in a letter to the poet/academic, Catherine Cole: "Now I feel I've reached the pinnacle of achievement when you equate me with one of Yeats's 'wild, wicked old men'. I'm probably remarkably wicked but not very wild, I fear too much ingrained Presbyterian caution".[5] Cole suggests that Hope represented the three attributes that Vladimir Nabokov believed essential in a writer, "storyteller, teacher, enchanter".[5]
Influence and impact
Kevin Hart, reviewing Catherine Cole's memoir of Hope, writes that "When A. D. Hope died in 2000 at the age of 93, Australia lost its greatest living poet".[4] Hart goes on to say that when once asked what poets do for Australia, Hope replied that "They justify its existence".[5]
He also wrote the poem "Coup de Grace," which translated means "the final blow," or "blow of mercy." This poem, like many others, demonstrates his views of women, and creates a sort of battle of the sexes.
Awards
- 1956: Grace Leven Prize for Poetry
- 1965: Britannica Award for Literature
- 1966: Australian Literature Society Gold Medal
- 1967: Myer Award for Australian Poetry
- 1969: Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for Literature (New York)
- 1969: Levinson Prize for Poetry[6] (Chicago)
- 1972: Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE)
- 1976: The Age Book of the Year Award for A Late Picking
- 1976: Robert Frost Award for Poetry
- 1981: Companion of the Order of Australia (AC)
- 1989: New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Special Award
- 1993: ACT Book of the Year Award for Chance Encounters[7]
Bibliography
Poetry
- The Wandering Islands (1955) Sydney: Edwards & Shaw.
- Poems (1960) London: Hamish Hamilton
- A.D.Hope (1963) Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
- Collected Poems: 1920-1965 (1966) Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
- New Poems: 1965-1969 (1969) Sydney: Angus and Robertson.
- Dunciad Minor: An Heroik Poem (1970) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
- Collected Poems: 1930-1970 (1972) Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
- Selected Poems (1973) Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
- A Late Picking: Poems 1965-1974 (1975) Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
- A Book of Answers (1981) Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
- The Age of Reason (1985) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
- Selected Poems (1986) Manchester: Carcanet.
- Orpheus (1991) Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
- Selected Poems (1992) Sydney: Angus & Robertson/Harper Collins.
Plays
- The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: By Christopher Marlow, purged and amended by A.D. Hope (1982) Canberra: Australian National University Press.
- Ladies from the Sea (1987) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Fiction
- The Journey of Hsü Shi (1989) Phoenix Review, No. 4.
Criticism
- "The Discursive Mode: Reflections on the Ecology of Poetry" Quadrant 1/1 (Summer 1956/57): 27-33.
- The Structure of Verse and Prose (1963) Sydney: Australasian Medical Publishing Co.
- Australian Literature 1950-1962 (1963) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
- The Cave and the Spring: Essays in Poetry (1965) Adelaide: Rigby. (A second edition was published in 1974 (Sydney: Sydney University Press) with changes and additions.)
- The Literary Influence of Academies (1970) Sydney: Sydney University Press.
- A Midsummer Eve's Dream: Variantions on a Theme by William Dunbar (1970) Canberra: Australian National University Press.
- Henry Kendall: A Dialogue with the Past (1972) Surry Hills: Wentworth Press.
- Henry Kendall (1973) Melbourne: Sun Books.
- Native Companions: Essays and Comments on Australian Literature 1936-1966 (1974) Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
- Judith Wright (1975) Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
- The Pack of Autolycus (1979) Canberra: Australian National University Press.
- The New Cratylus: Notes on the Craft of Poetry (1979) Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
- Directions in Australian Poetry (1984) Townsville: Foundation for Literary Studies.
Autobiography
- Chance Encounters (1992) Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.
Notes
- ^ "MS 5836 Papers of A.D. Hope (1907-2000)". National Library of Australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms5836. Retrieved 2007-07-13.
- ^ It's an Honour: OBE
- ^ It's an Honour: AC
- ^ a b c Hart (2008)
- ^ a b c cited by Hart (2008)
- ^ "The Poetry Foundation". Archived from the original on 2 July 2007. http://www.poetrymagazine.org/about/prizes.html. Retrieved 2007-07-13.
- ^ "ACT Book of the Year Winners". ACT Virtual Library. http://www.library.act.gov.au/find/history/frequentlyaskedquestions/Events/literaryawards/book_of_the_year/book_of_the_year_1993. Retrieved 2011-12-27.
References
- Hart, Kevin (26–27 April 2008). "Lines between us and the void: Review of The Poet Who Forgot by Catherine Cole". The Weekend Australian Review Section.
- "MS 5836 Papers of A.D. Hope (1907-2000)". National Library of Australia. http://nla.gov.au/nla.ms-ms5836. Retrieved 2007-07-13.
- McCulloch, Ann (2005). Dance of the Nomad: a study of the selected notebooks of A. D. Hope. Canberra: Pandanus Books. p. 366 p.. ISBN 1-74076-168-5.
- "On A.D. Hope (TLS, May 19, 2006)". Clive James. Archived from the original on 8 July 2007. http://www.clivejames.com/articles/clive/hope. Retrieved 2007-07-13.
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