Life and Works of A D Hope- for APPSC JL DL

 

A.D. (Alec Derwent) Hope (born July 21, 1907, Cooma, New South Wales, Australia—died July 13, 2000, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory) was an Australian poet who is best known for his elegies and satirical essays. He was also a critic, literary journalist, teacher and academic. He was referred to in an American journal as "the 20th century's greatest 18th-century poet".  is usually described as an Augustan poet, because of his frequent usage of allusions from classical, Graeco-Roman and the later neo-classical English literary traditions.

His father, Percival Hope, was a Presbyterian minister and his mother, Florence Ellen, a teacher. He was the eldest of five children. In 1910 his family moved to the Kirklands Presbyterian manse in the countryside ten kilometres from Campbell Town, Tasmania. He was educated partly at home.

He is married to Penelope Robinson in 1938. Hope’s first child, Katherine Emily (known as Emily), was born in 1940; twin sons, Geoffrey and Andrew, followed four years later.

Hope, who began publishing poems when he was 14 years old, was educated in Australia and at the University of Oxford. He taught at various Australian universities, including Sydney Teachers’ College and Melbourne University, until his retirement in 1972. Though traditional in form, his poetry is thoroughly modern, two outstanding examples being “Conquistador” (1947) and “The Return from the Freudian Isles” (1944). Both poems are typical in their satirical approach and striking clarity of diction. Hope also wrote religious and metaphysical poems, as well as erotic verse, which often attracted controversy, as did his attacks on the cultural establishment, which he considered pretentious and empty. His first book of poems, The Wandering Islands, appeared in 1955 and was followed by several volumes of new poems and of collected poems.

The poetry collections that followed demonstrated his range of interests, including New Poems 1965–1969 (1969), A Late Picking (1975), and Orpheus (1991). While known best for his early satires and carefully composed meditations such as ‘The Death of the Bird,’ his later work demonstrates a greater range of styles and subjects with ambitious love poems such as ‘An Epistle: Edward Sackville to Venetia Digby’ and ‘The Planctus’ sonnets, and engagements with scientific discovery such as ‘An Exercise on a Sphere’.

Though much of his poetry drew on European literature, he surprised readers with some poems about Australian life in his late book Antechinus (1981). Hope’s poetry often responded to the poetry of others, sometimes playfully as in his A Book of Answers. He included a response to the poem "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell.

He also wrote essays and criticism, including A Midsummer Eve’s Dream (1970), The Cave and the Spring (1965), and Native Companions (1974). He was made a member of the Order of the British Empire in 1972 and a Companion of the Order of Australia in 1981.His language skills are evident in his translations of Russian and Portuguese poets, and of his own poems into Italian. Hope’s poetry was widely taught in Australian schools and universities from the 1960s.

He remained in the family house at Forrest in inner Canberra until he moved in 1995 to a local nursing home, where he died on 13 July 2000, at the age of 93. In 1998 a celebration of his life and works, The Scythe Honed Fine, was published by the National Library of Australia.

 

Poetry collections

1.         The Wandering Islands (1955) -Australia, Crossing the Frontier are famous poems in it.

2.         Poems (1960) London:

3.         A.D.Hope (1963) Sydney: Collected Poems: 1930–1965 (1966)

4.         New Poems: 1965–1969 (1969)

5.         Dunciad Minor: An Heroik Poem (1970)

6.         Collected Poems: 1930–1970 (1972)

7.         Selected Poems (1973)

8.         A Late Picking : Poems 1965-1974 (1975)

9.         A Book of Answers (1981)

10.     The Age of Reason (1985)

11.     Selected Poems (1986)

12.     Orpheus (1991)- The Mayan Books is a famous poem.

13.     Selected Poems (1992)

14.     The shorter poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus: a new translation; translated by A. D. Hope (2007)

Plays

1.      The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus: By Christopher Marlowe, purged and amended by A.D. Hope (1982)

2.      Ladies from the Sea (1987).

Fiction

1.      The Journey of Hsü Shi (1989) Phoenix Review, No. 4.

Autobiography

1.      Chance Encounters (1992)

Biography

1.      A. D. Hope : A Life by Susan Lever, La Trobe University Press, (2026)