A. D. Hope
 

What we might call the anti-Shelley version of the myth.

One of my reasons for starting this thread is to ask the question, "Why isn't there a full collected edition of Hope's works?" He died 14 years ago. It's easy enough to find the Collected Poems that came out in 1972, and the Carcanet Selected Poems of 1986, edited by Ruth Morse. But there were five new books of poetry after 1972, none of them easily available - at least, in Europe. The only edition that Amazon offers of one of them, A Book of Answers, comes at the modest price of £3000 (three thousand pounds).

Does anyone Down Under have any information on this? Does Australia have anything like the equivalent of the Library of America?

Gregory, I don't have authoritative answers, but my curiosity was piqued, and in poking around I found Hope's page at the Australian Poetry Library. You've probably found it already, but perhaps it will be new to some.

I've only looked at it quickly, so I can't yet tell how many of Hope's books are represented there and how many are left out. I wonder whether the existence of sites like this discourages presses from doing the work of producing editions of collected works.

Thanks, Maryann. Actually I hadn't come across this site, which is very helpful. And one nice thing is that it includes a number of poems from A Book of Answers - the three-thousand-pound volume. Not the same as having the book, of course, but unless I win the lottery that will have to wait a while.

I see your point about publishers perhaps being deterred. It remains a scandal, however, that the country's best poet from the last century is only available in very costly dribs and drabs...

If you wanted to see these later books you could get them on inter-library loan, even a local suburban library can do this for you, they can access a database (forgotten the name of it, a long time since I have been a librarian) and the book/s will be sent, that way you could at least see it/them. Hope is certainly well known in Australia and I often see copies of his books in second hand stores, Judith Wright is our most popular dead poet and Les Murray the most famous living poet. I haven't read much Hope but I would say he is more an academic poet, not so popular ( and when I say popular I mean amongst the tiny educated 'elite' that read poetry). Our most famous/loved modern poem is 'Five Bells' by Kenneth Slessor.

Thanks, Ross. Good to hear an Australian take on this. I can imagine that Hope is not a popular poet, but he is certainly a great one.

Yes, an inter-library loan is one possibility. But it's not the same as owning a copy... And there really should be a Collected Poems by now.

Hope wrote a book on Judith Wright, which I haven't read but would like to get hold of. Amazon.co.uk has it on offer at £108. As far as I can see, the Australian Amazon only has two books by him, both Kindle editions: a Selected Poems and the Dunciad Minor. It is actually very good to have these easily available - especially because the Selected contains a number of poems from the later books, which are so difficult to get hold of.

Anyway, at this point we need a little more poetry. Here's a link to The Death of the Bird on that great website Maryann indicated above.

And here's one of my favourites, The School Of Night.

The first major poetry assignment we ever got at school was to choose any poem we wanted and record ourselves reading it with a background music we felt fitting. I did 'The Death of a Bird'. I read it to a piece of one of Beethoven's symphonies. I'm trying to recall which one! But I remember being 14 and crying my eyes out over this poem.

Thanks for raising Hope, Gregory!

Cally

Your link doesn't seem to work, Cally. Here's another one .

And here's a link to a discussion of Hope led years ago by Alan Sullivan.

And here's another one , just to prove there's nothing we can say on this forum that hasn't already been said, probably better, by earlier members.

By the way, does anyone know of an easy way to get rid of the red evidencing of your search-terms, once you've found an old thread?

Gregory,

You just need to edit the URL in your browser's address bar. Here's what you linked (minus the initial h):

ttp://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=4763&highlight=Alec+Derwent+Hope

Now, if you cut everything after the ampersand, in other words, cut:

&highlight=Alec+Derwent+Hope

you end up with this:

ttp://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=4763

If you look closely, you'll see I cut the h off the http to keep the software from auto-formatting the link. When I add it back in:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=4763

et, voila, the red is gone.

Thanks,

Bill

Thanks, Bill!

http://uwap.uwa.edu.au/books-and-aut...et-who-forgot/

This is a good and poignant book. I had some correspondence with Alec in the late 70s and 80s, and I earlier heard him read in 1968, which occasioned a lifelong love affair with his work. He was a great poet, of course, but a great man as well. I would hate to see his works vanish into obscurity. He is part of the great tradition but, like Clive James (to a lesser degree), has suffered from being Antipodean. This sonnet should prove the peer of any in English. Any.

[nevermind]

Thanks, Sam. I didn't know that book and will have to get hold of it.

I don't think total obscurity is likely in Hope's case but it is certainly a pity that even partial obscurity should have fallen on his later books. I hope it'll be possible to remedy that.

Cally is on the case, for a start...

i've been checking out Hope, not a great fan but I heard in an interview on the radio that he used 'dreamworkers' to help him write his poetry, so I'm with him on that score. Just thought I'd mention that if you are really keen there are bookfinders, companies that will find books for you, I would imagine what you are after would be easy to find in Australia, also if you look on Radio National, Australia's ABC, (Australian National Broadcaster), like the BBC, you will find an archive of poetry radio broadcasts, there's two I found on Hope, one has Clive James reading one of his poems, then a discussion, another I noticed had a reading list of local books about his work (including a collected old and new essays).
He was a weird bloke, from another time really, he seemed to have no affinity with the contemporary world, who can blame him? Some one who met him when he was old described it as like meeting Gandalf.

Thanks, Ross, for the advice. Here in fact is a link to one of the programmes you refer to (for which I also thank David Mason). A great discussion of "The Death of the Bird", with Clive James.

I stole a phrase from "The Death of The Bird" a few years ago for a poem. My poem languishes somewhere in a virtual drawer, but it pleased me at the time, and it was, in part, my hat-tip to A.D. Hope's mastery.

OK: the phrase was inane dominions. I still covet it.

You do right to covet it, Michael. I think Hope was remembering the last line of Act III of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound: "Pinnacled dim in the intense inane."

Bless you for blessing my transgression, Gregory! And thank you for the gloss / connection of the phrase to Shelley, which I hadn't made.

His light still flickers but we need more Ern Malleys.

People often use the Ern Malley hoax as a vindication of formal poetry over free verse, it's not that simple, apart from the closeness of the Ern Malley poems to the cut and chance pairing of sentences practiced by Ginsberg and Burroughs, among others, you can see from the example below (S1 of Sweet Willaim) that the 'poetry' was not nonsense, it was a clever hoax, perpetrated by experienced poets.

I have avoided your wide English eyes:
But now I am whirled in their vortex.
My blood becomes a Damaged Man
Most like your Albion;
And I must go with stone feet
Down the staircase of flesh
To where in a shuddering embrace
My toppling opposites commit
The obscene, the unforgivable rape.

Hope was a good friend of at least one of the perpetrators of the Ern Malley hoax, James McAuley, and if they hadn't done it probably he would have tried something similar.

"Inane dominions" is worth a thousand words. More so with every day, it seems!

I agree, Terese. Ruefully and wholeheartedly.

Formal poetry does not need vindication Ross

I was referring to A. D. Hope not 'formal poetry'. Have you read his essay on free verse, it is available on line, search 'A.D.Hope essays" it is a disgraceful deceptive essay by a man obviously frightened by modern poetry and reacting against it. It so angered me that a professor of english could use such deceptive tactics such as deliberately publishing Eliot and Whitman without using correct line endings and manipulating the text to make his points.. I was disgusted and lost a lot of respect for Hope. I first read Hope 50 years ago and found him wooden and academic, he didn't speak to me. No doubt he wrote some fine work and was and is much loved but when he tried to discredit Eliot and Whitman by deceitful means he lost my vote. And if you don't believe me I will be happy to post his essay and tear it to bits. He didn't to my knowledge ever retract it or apologise for his deceit.

Ross,

I would love to read that essay and your profanation of it. If there is anything I hate more than a stuffy moralist it's a stuffy metrist!

I was ranting a bit but I was a teacher and librarian at Universities and various colleges so I really was angered by Hope's essay. I have actually read a few of his poems and I can see he was a wonderful poet and an extraordinary man. But I hate people who are either or when in comes to poetry, it seems one-eyed not to see the value of free verse or too think formal verse is no longer valid.

I think hating people who are either/or is a little excessive. Hope didn't like free verse and put his views in writing, as was only natural for a scholar and poet. Maybe he overstated things - and perhaps he misquoted to make his point, which is clearly less forgivable. And I know he said somewhere (I can't find it at the moment) that the title of his essay ("Free Verse: a Post-Mortem") had proved a little premature. But given the range of his true accomplishments I'd say we don't need to be too bothered by this blind spot of his. Tolstoy, after all, couldn't understand Shakespeare. Eliot dismissed Byron. And so it goes...

'Perhaps' Greg, have your read the essay. As I said it's online. but you're right, I of course don't hate the people just the intellectual position. Did I mention the first person to encourage me to write poetry was Douglas Stewart, he was poetry editor at the same publishers where I was junior editor. Just name dropping!!
cheers
Ross

Yes, if you're referring to the essay included in The Cave and the Spring. I read it a while ago and I've just checked it out again. I suppose you could say he misquotes, in that he re-arranges the line-breaks in "Ash Wednesday" in order to question their sheer arbitrariness (as he sees it). But he does warn you that that is what he is doing. I can't find him doing the same thing to Whitman, although he does talk about him (whom he clearly prefers to Eliot - or, at least, dislikes less), but maybe that's in another essay.

It's certainly a questionable essay - and it probably helped to make Hope deeply unfashionable - but it has a certain coherence of its own. It helps you understand why he wrote the kind of poetry he did.

A good name to drop, Ross.

This poem more than anything else did much damage to Hope's status as a poet in Australia:

Australia by Alec Derwent Hope

A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

They call her a young country, but they lie:
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.

Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: "we live" but "we survive",
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,

Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.

Hope's son is terribly greedy, and he's not doing his father any favors. I wrote two poems for Hope, and Les Murray published them right after his death. I owe a big debt to Dave, Sam, and Dana for introducing me to the great man's work.

Tim, I had a brief exchange with Hope's sons a few years ago seeking permission to quote lines from his poems in an essay. They were both very reasonable and requested no payment at all, unlike the estate of Auden, which requested an absurd amount, so that the publisher had to ask me to cut the quotations from his work. As I say, it was a brief exchange but very civil.

Jan
I think the poem you posted 'Australia' has some rich imagery and is very accurate, except he says Australia has no songs, did Hope ever hang out with aboriginals or was he too fixated with the past, if he'd left his study more he might have realised our country is full of the most ancient continous song cycles in the world.