[ross hamilton hill]

'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

[Gregory Dowling]

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.

[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

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.