Although one of the greatest Australian poets of the 20th century, the real A.D. Hope remains something of a mystery.

That is all I can do. It is you must record and create.
From now on it is you must decide what you think about me.
I cannot contribute opinions or join in debate
But to check matters of fact of course I am free.

Good Luck to you!
Your amorphous
Biographee!
- A.D. Hope, Letter to Ann McCulloch

Many people at ANU might think A.D. Hope is little more than the name of a building just off University Avenue. They may also connect the name with the large, imposing portrait in the foyer of that same monument. Even among those who are familiar with his poetry, little is known of Hope except by those who knew him personally.

So what are the facts? The building is named after the man who joined ANU in 1961. Born in Cooma, NSW, in 1907, Alec Derwent Hope’s education and academic career until then had taken him to Oxford University (where he was a student of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis), Sydney Teachers’ College, the University of Melbourne and Canberra University College.
As Professor of English at the latter, his position was absorbed into ANU when the institutions amalgamated and he became the University’s Foundation Professor of English. He retired from academia in 1968 but retained an office at ANU where he composed poetry for many more years.
One of the greatest Australian poets of the 20th century, Hope received wide acclaim for his work. His awards included the Grace Leven Prize for Poetry (1956); the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal (1966); The Levinson Prize for Poetry (1969); the Robert Frost Award for Poetry (1976); and an Order of the British Empire and Order of Australia in 1972 and 1981 respectively.

Such details are easily obtained, but Hope the man is a much more difficult identity to understand. In 1980, still 20 years before his death, Hope wrote of his fear of being shoehorned by a biography. “Philip Martin is presumably on the job already. In the conversations I had with him last year, I continually felt that involuntary attempt to get me into a neat package and even while I felt that the intellectual cage was quite just and perceptive, I was tempted at every step to revolt, to cry: I am Proteus: let me out of here!”

Seven years after his death, no biography exists, the closest volume being Ann McCulloch’s The Dance of the Nomad, which is more an academic study and selection from Hope’s notebooks. Although written as a kind of journal, the notebooks reveal very little about him personally or about the events in his life. Instead they are collections of his musings on artistic, academic and spiritual matters that interested him.

Throughout the notebooks runs his insistence that his vocation was as a poet, not a scholar. “I was never conscious of having a destiny either, simply a sense that poetry was my business in this world and that nothing else really mattered,” Hope wrote in a letter to Ann McCulloch. In that light his retirement from teaching at ANU in 1968 must have come as a relief, allowing him to return to his true calling.

“While I don’t know that being an academic was his first choice in life, it gave him some influence at a very formative time for the field of humanities and I think he felt that a lot of influence needed to be exercised at that particular point,” says former student and University of Sydney academic David Brooks.

This is an opinion clearly reflected in Hope’s notebooks where the poet could be as critical of critics as he was of other writers. “Nothing excuses bad writing and the attempt to argue that this bad writing was the only way for the new experiment to succeed reveals the muddle-headed critic and the muddle-headed novelist alike,” he wrote in 1980.
Also present throughout his notebooks is a constantly changing idea of the relationship between the poet and his poetry. In 1957 he wrote, “It is valuable in asking that criticism be concerned only with the poem as a [Ding an Sich] (thing in itself), not with the poem as biography, social or literary history. But it becomes absurd when it ignores what biography, history and literary history have to tell us about the poem.”

Not ten years later another entry mused, “It would be hardly less crass for the critic to take the ‘facts’ of the poem as comic intention but to attribute to me a view in favour of the state of nature, or of longing for bold, bawdy and sexual licence. The Poet is taken to be expressing his view or his attitude, using the poem as a dramatic device.”
According to Brooks this reflects a long argument between academics, critics and poets. “The idea that the poet is somehow outside the poem, the impersonality of the poem, was embedded in a thing we call the new criticism which was dominant in the teaching of English Literature at ANU, especially in the 1960s and 70s,” Brooks says. “It’s something that changes with fashion and I think we’ve got to read Hope from our own time and come to our decisions about his work. I think his personality was very strongly reflected in his poetry and I don’t have any difficulty with that.”

When Hope’s first book of poetry, The Wandering Islands, was published in 1955 (quite late in his career as a writer) critics struggled to place it. “[M]embers of the avant-garde may feel impelled to dismiss Hope as an incurable traditionalist while people themselves incurably conservative (rather than traditionalist) may regard him as an experimentalist, a confirmed tamperer with the emotional status quo. The moralist may regard him as amoral, the aesthete may find him distressingly didactic,” wrote critic Vincent Buckley in a 1957 essay.

As intellectual and literary fashions changed throughout the 20th century, so, to an extent, did Hope’s poetry. But his preference for metrical verse and sexual subject matter remained to be judged in a very different light. “What he was writing in the 1930s was way ahead of its time,” says Brooks. “But into the late 60s and 70s and into an age of second and third wave feminism, the fact that he’d written about sex and was an old man as well, meant he was considered somehow to be chauvinistic and writing against his time.”

Last year the Humanities Research Centre at ANU hosted a conference to celebrate the life and work of Hope. This marked 100 years since his birth and was intended to reassess his place in Australian and international poetry. “When a major literary figure dies, their reputation peaks a little just after their death but then it slumps a bit. I think some people, myself included, felt it was time for a kind of reappraisal of his work and a way of registering the impact of his work on Australian poetry,” says Brooks, who convened the event.

The news from the conference was positive. Translations of Hope’s work into French are underway and a small group of American academics and poets are carrying his torch in the United States. Two very different readings of Hope’s The Death of the Bird – one traditional and one post-modern – generated controversy that, in Brooks’ view, demonstrates Hope’s timelessness.

“It was like the present talking to the past and when you considered the two readings side by side, the post-modern version opened it up and poem was strong enough to answer back and even say at various points, ‘yes, I know, but you haven’t thought this far yet’,” says Brooks. “It was a way of liberating the actual power that is in the work.”

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ANU Reporter 
Summer 2008