A.D. Hope. National Archives of Australia, CC BY-NC-NDI began teaching Australian literature not long after the death of Alec Derwent (A.D.) Hope (1907-2000). Despite Hope’s canonical status, I – like many – overlooked him, gravitating to writers more engaged with feminist, environmental, postcolonial and decolonial questions, or to those whose poetry was freshly modern, postmodern or experimental. Hope seemed conventional and dated by comparison. Such assumptions were reinforced by his most anthologised poem, Australia (1943), with its image of the land as menopausal woman:She is the last of lands, the emptiest,A woman beyond her change of life, a breast Still tender but within the womb is dry. And even allowing for its time of writing, this poem’s silence about Australia’s First Peoples presents a barrier for many readers. In short, why bother?Review: A.D. Hope: A Life – Susan Lever (La Trobe University Press )Susan Lever’s compelling biography A.D. Hope: A Life asks us to stop and think again. Well aware of what will strike readers as problematic, Lever prompts us to revisit Hope’s writings. Tracing the life, career and achievement of this “grand old man”, the all-but-forgotten poet and professor, Lever documents his contribution to Australian literary culture during a formative period of postwar nation building. That the biography yields an excellent cultural history is one of its attractions. But even more arresting is what Lever shows about the philosophical reach, formal brilliance and impassioned force of Hope’s poetry. It’s the poetry that stands at the core of this biography. The poetry speaks into the gaps left, for instance, by embargoed letters. It dramatises the contradictory aspects of Hope’s life as suburban husband and father, as philanderer and poet-professor, as radio broadcaster for children, as savagely caustic reviewer, and as generous mentor to young writers. The reverse is also true: we see how the paradoxes shaping his intellect, passions, views and desires are imprinted within and generative of the poetry. This is apparent in both the poetry’s formal design and its content. Hope’s university education was checkered: a stellar undergraduate career at Sydney, a disappointing third-class honours degree at Oxford, then teacher training. But this period exposed him to psychology, especially Freud, and fostered his love of philosophy, languages and philology. It also inspired his abiding admiration of 17th- and 18th-century poets and satirists like Ben Jonson, Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift. Enamoured of this neoclassical literary tradition, Hope resisted the dominant, post-romantic modes and forms of his own time: the personal lyric and free verse. He instead turned towards, and advocated for, the liveliness of discursive forms like the long narrative poem, the satire, the meditation and the epistle. These, he wrote in his essay The Discursive Mode (1956), allowed for “narrative, drama, excogitation, argument, description”. They were, in other words, forms for thinking with. The poetry is dark, the poetry is bleak, the poetry is funny, the poetry is joyful. And it is disciplined. Inhabiting a variety of older forms and modes, the poetry is always precise, metrically controlled and rhymed. At the same time, Hope makes his verses think and speak. His poems voice ideas and questions, canvassing matters that still press on us today:Go tell those old men, safe in bed,We took their orders and are dead.(Inscription for a War, 1971)Returning to the poetry, we discover that Hope’s invocation and remodelling of traditional forms – of classical, biblical and mythical scenes, and of 17th- and 18th-century texts – is what makes his poetry modernist in form and spirit. Darkness and bawdinessLever’s biography takes us from Hope’s idyllic childhood in Tasmania to his old age as the “great panjandrum of Canberra” (in Patrick White’s vengeful phrase). In Lever’s telling, productive antinomies recur. Poems drawn from childhood, such as Ascent into Hell and Observation Car from his collection The Wandering Islands (1955), are haunted by darkness and existential dread. Observation Car recalls a train journey away from home. Not unlike Walter Benjamin’s backward-gazing angel of history, the poet is spellbound, transfixed by receding time as the train hurls him relentlessly onward: Only the past is assured. From the observation carI stand looking back and watching the landscape shrivel,Wondering where are we going and just where the hell we are.Yet Observation Car also contains images that objectify women’s bodies, a pattern that recurs elsewhere in Hope’s poetry. His bawdy verse satires, penned during and beyond his student years, together with his ongoing preoccupation with sexuality, earned him the nickname of “Phallic Alec”. Cover of A.D. Hope first book of poetry The Wandering Islands (1955) In his more serious and sophisticated poems, like The Double Looking Glass (1963), women’s bodies are still subject to the male gaze. Even so, as implied by its title, the looking glass is double, refracting many layers. Lever is not an apologist. But her account persuades us that at least some of these poems dramatise intense struggles with masculinity, sexuality and desire. “Readers do not need to look far to find patriarchal positions or failures of taste in Hope’s poetry,” she writes, “but his best work examines sexuality in a way that reveals the poet’s own struggles to understand it.” Hope’s poetry can be read both ways at once: as objectifying and as self-implicated. And though Lever chooses not to dwell on gossip, her account shows the importance of Hope’s various love affairs for his poetry.Hope’s sensibility, Lever suggests, aligned with that of a key cohort of mid-century writers, internationally and across the political spectrum, who felt “that a return to tradition in art was essential to preserving social order”. This suggestion doesn’t dislodge, but it does reframe, Hope’s reputation as conservative and out of date. At the same time, the biography highlights the lucidity and feeling of his poetry’s response to the modernity of his own time, and perhaps ours.One of Hope’s recurring questions concerns the role of the poet in secular, scientific modernity. Inspired by the University of Sydney philosopher John Anderson, Hope soon shed the religiosity of his Presbyterian upbringing for atheism and scientific materialism. But the biography unfolds a paradox: in life and in poetry, he sought spiritual meaning that might square with science. For Hope, poetry, like music, is sourced in mystery. This is dramatised, for instance, in his polyphonic poem, Vivaldi, Bird and Angel, Or, Il Cardinello (1972): Somewhere beyond this frame of natural laws, Moving in time on its predestined grooves, I hear another music to which it moves. Wherever I go, whatever I do, I seem To step in time to that resistless stream And though, I trust, a rational man, I vow I heard it as a child, I hear it now; With every year I live, it sounds more clear, More vast, more jubilant to the inward ear; Beyond my power to imagine or invent That choir of being, or this sole instrument Of my response to that invisible world. The Australianness (or not) of Hope’s poetry is, thankfully, not at issue in Lever’s biography. We are reminded, too, of Hope’s impatience with hackneyed settler tropes of the bush. This rejection of parochialism seems yet another mark of his modernity. With publication of The Wandering Islands, his late-arriving first book of poetry, Hope won international as well as national recognition. Even so, Lever’s biography registers the consequences of Australia’s distance from the literary centres of London and New York. Hope’s poetic mode runs in tandem with that of other poets of his time, notably with the work of W.H. Auden. Lever does not argue, in line with some earlier commentators, that Hope was influenced by Auden. But her biography assures us that he did read Auden’s poetry, along with that of many of his contemporaries. Hope’s poetry is both like and unlike Auden’s “iceberg verse”: it is “tidy” like Auden’s, and metrically disciplined, even clinical, but it is neither “cold” nor “oblique”. Persistence, poise and acumenReading Lever’s account makes it clear that, despite difficulties, interruptions and constraints, Hope’s academic life and poetry wove together. His public lectures and literary essays, his outreach through teaching and broadcasting, his sometimes vexed networks, his friendships with the literary luminaries of his day (Douglas Stewart, James Macauley, Judith Wright, Leonie Kramer, Rosemary Dobson, James Macauley, among many others) and with politicians and prime ministers – all this put Hope at the centre of Australian literature in the cultural heyday of its study and professionalisation. Susan Lever makes clear how A.D. Hope’s life and poetry were woven together. Georgie Greene/Black Inc. That this is the first biography of Hope, appearing more than two decades after his death, borders on shocking. It is a gift for which we should be grateful, especially given the precarity, in these “job-ready” days, of literature – let alone Australian literature – as a subject of university teaching and scholarly investment.Taking on such a project against the odds required persistence, fortitude, poise and critical acumen. These are the very qualities that make Lever’s biography shine. Clear eyed about her subject, she is intelligently sensitive to Hope’s life; she shows us the brilliance of his poetry’s form and language, and the liveliness of its thought and feeling.Returning to Hope’s poetry after reading the biography, I found much to enjoy and admire. The late poem A Swallow in the House (1991), for example, describes a familiar situation in order to generate a question of startling applicability today. The bird, trapped inside the house, is baffled by the transparency of the window. The familiar “yielding element” suddenly “becomes a wall”. And so:We drop bewildered, not knowing why we fall.What in my house, what perhaps in my centuryWaits to baffle us all? We can only wait and see.The poem recognises our blinkered presentism. Gesturing to things invisible yet in plain sight, it prompts us to ask what we, in the common sense of our contemporary moment, might fail to see, understand or appreciate.Brigid Rooney does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.