This essay was published in Chronicles, June, 1999. I thought it would be apropos since several discussions of Hope have occurred recently on various Eratosphere boards.
A. D. Hope: Poet of the Antipodes
The other day I was reading an article about Keats when I thought suddenly of A. D. Hope. Before I finished the article I’d almost forgotten about Keats. I was imagining a time when young writers would lose interest in the romance of a vivid English youth extinguished by early death. Instead they would learn to admire the less gifted but longer lived Australian who ultimately wrote great poetry by dint of sheer persistence. In this improbable future pitiless teachers would urge prospective poets to travel the world, master foreign languages, and teach mathematics in trade school as young Alec Hope did. Or they might suggest novices hone their skills writing science fiction. Dumped in the Twenty-First Century by a careless time traveler, Keats recovers from tuberculosis, resumes his medical studies and devises a virus which infects "creative writing" departments with mad cow disease.
Little known in the United States, A. D. Hope has been a tireless enemy of literary hokum all his life. In the 1940’s, when Australian literati were all atwitter over Surrealism, Hope’s friends James MacAuley and Harold Stewart gulled a well-known editor into believing he had discovered a great new poet, Ern Malley, whose work the hoaxers had salted “with a mish-mash of all the then popular avante garde theories of poetry, surrealist vomit, Marxist propaganda, free verse techniques, multiple meaningless references to irrelevant objects, pictures, ideas and what have you.” The Ern Malley hoax gained its perpetrators world-wide publicity, but it failed to cleanse minds poisoned by conflict and ideology. Hope’s ferocious satire, "Dunciad Minor," made no difference either; and his 1960 essay, "Free Verse: A Post Mortem," proved an exercise in wishful thinking. Only now, at the turn of the century and the end of Hope’s long life, does the Free Verse Establishment finally seem troubled by the reek of its own decay. Some of its former stalwarts are writing quasi-formal poems; others are issuing defensive manifestos; but many have begun to suspect why their public has fled, holding its collective nose.
Future critics may see Hope chiefly as a satirist sluicing the gutters of academia, but I hope they won’t overlook his more serious work. When he put aside literary politics to let his mind range freely through art and science, myth and history, Hope wrote some of the most profound and numinous poems of this century. En route to the achievements of his maturity, he worked patiently to develop a personal style, absorbing and transmuting various influences until he mastered them all. In the course of this essay, I shall trace some of those influences and discuss the development of his major themes during the autumnal decades when he matched the ancients Horace or Po Chu-i in wisdom and magnanimity.
Alec Derwent Hope was born in 1907 at Cooma, New South Wales. His father was a Presbyterian minister who was soon posted to a congregation in Tasmania. There Alec was home-schooled in the classics of English literature until age fourteen, when his parents sent him to the mainland. An outstanding student, he later won a scholarship to Oxford, where he felt lonesome, poor and ill-prepared. He brought home an undistinguished third-class degree in 1931. With no prospects and no money, he knocked around Australia during the Depression years, eventually landing a post at the Sydney Teachers College, and later a lectureship at Melbourne University. In 1951 he became the first professor of English at the newly-founded Canberra University, a post he held for sixteen years. He knew very well that no poet, even a surrealist, could expect to earn a living from his craft in Australia. Academia was a recourse he grudgingly accepted; yet he was, by all accounts, a fine teacher who inspired students with his own love of learning.
Much of Hope’s early work was destroyed by a fire soon after he moved to Canberra. The manuscript of his first collection survived, and it was published in 1955. The Wandering Islands proved a controversial debut. Hope had already made many enemies with the savage reviews he had penned for literary magazines. His own poems were also distressing to some of his countrymen. Though he omitted the troublesome "Australia" from the book, Hope had circulated it privately, and he included it in subsequent collections. In "Australia" Hope called his continent "A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate gray / In the field uniform of modern wars..." Four stanzas later he assailed "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." As alarming as Hope’s crypto-libertarianism was his explicit and sometimes violent eroticism, which he often coupled with peculiar interpretations of Biblical themes. Yet Hope was also an unabashed Formalist, working in the tradition of Spenser, Milton, and the Romantic poets he had read as a boy. The combination seemed puzzling and improbable: something to displease everyone.
Unperturbed by his many critics, Hope produced ten more volumes of poetry over the ensuing thirty-six years. Six of these consisted entirely of new work; the rest were collections or selections from his growing corpus. The pace actually increased after Hope’s retirement in 1967. This would be remarkable output for a young man; as the monument of an old one, it is virtually unparalleled. Volume by volume, Hope’s voice grew clearer and more powerful until it acquired the hieratic authority of an Outback prophet.
In his memoir, Chance Encounters, Hope admitted that a principal influence on his youthful poetry was the brilliant but decadent Swinburne, a Victorian whose elegant empty verses helped to provoke the modernist revolt of Pound and Eliot. None of Hope’s boyish imitations survived the fortuitous fire in Canberra. The earliest extant poems date from the time of his return from Oxford, and even those were much revised before he finally published them. Though the metaphysical and Romantic poets were background presences in Hope’s work, the most prominent influence at mid-century was W. H. Auden, whose style Hope imitates unmistakably in The Wandering Islands. What could be more Audenesque than a sentence like this? "The committee of atolls inspires in them no devotion / And the earthquake belt no special attitude." But Hope turned Auden’s diction and quirky phrasing to his own purposes. He did not share Auden’s leftist politics, and he was never evasive about sex. . For puritanical Australia, poems like "Conquistador" were slaps in the face of censorship, which was still very much in force during the Fifties. Here the language was Audenesque, composed in a breezy ballad stanza like that of "Miss Gee," but the theme was pure Hope at his most hopeless: "Adventure opened wide its grisly jaws; / Henry looked in and knew the Hero’s doom. / The huge white girl drank on without a pause / And, just at closing time, she asked him home." Poor Henry wound up a footrug in the giantess' bedroom.
For Hope, woman was a delight, a danger and an embodied sacrament. Accordingly, his tone in sexual poems could range from bawdy to prurient to reverential, depending on his purpose. In "Lot And His Daughters" all three notes were struck for a shocking meditation on Biblical incest. In the sardonic "Imperial Adam," the first act of procreation was lovingly celebrated among the innocent beasts; Eve was midwifed by "the gravid elephant, the calving hind," then, as the proud but helpless father stood by, he saw "Between her legs a pygmy face appear, / And the first murderer lay upon the earth." A later poem, "The Coast of Cerigo," recounted in lurid detail the myth of the Labra, a fatal mermaid who clutched and crushed bewitched fishermen. Such themes earned Hope a reputation for misogyny, but his accusers must reckon with "Clover Honey," a playful tale with a persuasive and charming female narrator, not to mention "The Western Elegies," a poignant farewell to his wife of fifty-one years, Penelope, who predeceased him in 1988. Only the most callous and simple-minded critic could sustain a claim of woman-hatred against the author of such a moving work.
Forgetting Hope's own comment in "Australia," the simple-minded have also assailed him as a "second hand European." During his formative decades, the Thirties and Forties, Australian writers were attempting to create an indigenous literature. In his survey of Hope’s work, the American scholar Robert Darling reflects on literary context: "From the beginning, white Australians have taken two different approaches regarding their country. One is to embrace its newness and proclaim their independence.... The other at its most extreme is an attempt to maintain their customs as if the old country had never been left." Hope was sometimes portrayed by indiginists as an unregenerate Europhile. Actually his homeland was ever-present in Hope's imagination and his poetry. Sometimes he depicted it as a grim yet potentially nourishing desert ("Australia"); sometimes it was the setting for cosmological or philosophical reflections ("The Drifting Continent"); sometimes it was an invisible backdrop, the blank page on which he dared to reinterpret literature and religion. As a young man Hope tramped the countryside and often camped for weeks on remote shores. He knew Australia’s geology and geography, its flora and fauna, its natural and human history at least as well as the ridiculous Jindyworobaks, whose cultivation of idiom wound up sounding merely provincial, even to fellow Australians.
Like Americans, Australians straining against the English leash have often lurched into populism and parochialism. Hope's education—and the curiosity which kept him broadening it all his life—put him at odds with the know-nothing impulse among his countrymen, whom he often satirized. Yet he was equally brusque with the faddish preoccupations of self-appointed intellectuals, whose blind anti-colonialism tempted them to denigrate the very tradition which permitted, even supported their critique. Did dissidents win literary prizes from the Soviets? Would aboriginal elders applaud adolescents who rejected their culture? Such questions didn’t trouble Australian academicians any more than they did Americans. Hope's vast erudition, his fluency in foreign languages, his agnosticism and shameless eroticism made him an object of suspicion to populists and intellectuals alike. As Ruth Morse observed in her introduction to Hope's Selected Poems, "hostility to education is a feature of many of the mass democracies, where it is identified with the colonial experience and the rule of the Empire."
At one time or another, Hope studied Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Old Norse, German, Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, Russian and Arabic. In his book-length essay on poetics, The New Cratylus, Hope described his acquisitions in aggressive, almost imperialistic terms, doubtlessly knowing he would scandalize his critics: "I explored and plundered other languages, mostly by my own efforts, with a few helping lessons from professional teachers." Hope excused his greed by explaining, "if we go straight to the poetry in learning another language, we get to the pure essence...."
Armed with his looted knowledge, he drew upon a range of allusion far beyond English literature. Few critics are competent to comment. For the record, I have some Latin and a smattering of French. I’m not equipped to judge Hope’s translation of Anna Akhmatova. I do know English versification well enough to tell that any decoder of Hope’s work needs the prosodic equivalent of a rock-climber’s toolkit. Not only could Hope manage the most difficult stanzas, like the effortless Byronic ottava rima of “A Letter From Rome,” but he even tried his hand at classical Latin hexameter, which he carried off brilliantly in English, a feat with little precedent in literary history. Yet Hope’s omnivorous mind was by no means content to gorge itself only on languages and poetry. He was also a keen observer of the natural world who read widely in the sciences, seeking the meanings and interrelationships of everything he saw.
I shall turn now to a more detailed discussion of two poems: one, an early piece I shall quote in full; the other, a large work which exemplifies the admirable qualities of Hope’s later years. First, "The Pleasure of Princes." from Selected Poems:
What pleasures have great princes? These: to know
Themselves reputed mad with pride or power;
To speak few words—few words and short bring low
This ancient house, that city with flame devour;
To make old men, their fathers’ enemies,
Drunk on the vintage of the former age;
To have great painters show their mistresses
Naked to the succeeding time; engage
The cunning of able, treacherous ministers
To serve, despite themselves, the cause they hate,
And leave a prosperous kingdom to their heirs
Nursed by the caterpillars of the state;
To keep their spies in good men’s hearts; to read
The malice of the wise and act betimes;
To hear the Grand Remonstrances of greed,
Led by the pure; to cheat justice of her crimes;
To beget worthless sons and, being old,
By starlight climb the battlements, and while
The pacing sentry hugs himself with cold,
Keep vigil like a lover, muse and smile,
And think, to see from the grim castle steep
The midnight city below rejoice and shine:
"There my great demon grumbles in his sleep
And dreams of his destruction, and of mine."
What can we say of Hope as a political thinker, based on this text? First and foremost, he has read his Machiavelli (in Italian, of course). Second, we can see at once his kinship with Auden, and also his differences. In this early poem he employed Auden’s complex syntax along with Audenesque phrases like "the caterpillars of the state" and "Grand Remonstrances." He obviously shared Auden’s distaste for the prerogatives of aristocracy, which the Englishman had expressed in such poems as "Embassy" and "Song." ("Deftly, admiral...") Was Hope’s poetry scented with a whiff of envy, like Auden's; or was Hope obliquely indicating, in this Italianate context, his contempt for the British class system which so dismayed him at Oxford? Given Hope's humble upbringing in rural Tasmania, I would suspect the latter. And he added a liberal dose of his own political agnosticism. Where he accounted one of the ruler’s pleasures "to cheat justice of her crimes," I detect a sly, almost conspiratorial sympathy with the prince. Hope seemed to be hinting that Plato's Philosopher King was beyond human reach. The wily, self-serving Prince was the best ruler any state could expect. Only the prince would suborn the clever, intoxicate the tyrannous with "vintage of the former age," and tranquilize the populace with prosperity.
Auden never used the word justice flippantly, only sincerely or ironically. A frustrated idealist, he never wholly abandoned his faith in the idea of secular perfection, though he grew increasingly disillusioned with failed attempts to achieve it. One of his favorite poetic strategies was to juxtapose comfortable and complacent characters with the wretched of the earth, as though wealth were the cause of poverty. In this respect he had an instinctive affinity for so-called liberation theology. We should remember that Auden, troubled by a sense of individual and collective sin, returned to the Church in his later years. Hope, on the other hand, had scant expectation of justice, either human or divine. He knew the mob could call a lynching justice without batting its eyelids, and he didn’t repose much trust in judges either—they are too easily corrupted. In "The Pleasure of Princes" Hope held with Machiavelli that the best government keeps armed watch while wearing a velvet glove. The Twentieth Century has demonstrated the peril of Auden’s ideal; it remains to be seen whether the Twenty-First will prove that humanity should also dispense with the guard, the glove and the Prince.
In 1984, when he was 77, Hope finished a new book of poetry, The Age of Reason. The text consisted of eleven large poems, all in a form called the heroic couplet, which was widely used by Eighteenth Century poets, and subsequently retired as over-simple and over-done. Hope made no attempt to duplicate the diction of the time: this would have resulted in mere parody. Instead, as he explained in a short preface, his couplets were written in a style "modified to accept the rhythms of contemporary English and avoiding all conventional poetic devices apart from those of metre." Several of the poems were epistolary—exchanges of letters recreated in verse. Others invented dialogue for historical figures. Together they constituted an extraordinary evocation of that era, as well as an implicit rebuke to our own for the ideologies which obscure our understanding of the past.
The Age of Reason varied in quality from poem to poem; but the two best, "The Isle of Aves" and "The Bamboo Flute," matched the finest work of the Eighteenth Century or of our own. Both were epistolary poems. "The Isle of Aves" depicted an exchange between two sea captains, Lemuel Gulliver and William Dampier, who sailed the world’s oceans at the bidding of a young British Empire. "The Bamboo Flute" was the imaginary correspondence of two painters, John Zoffany and Tilly Kettle, who emigrated to India some fifty years later, when the British were just consolidating their control of the subcontinent and the romance of the Raj was seducing them.
At our contemporary distance it's too easy to overlook the complexity of human interactions between colonized and colonizers. During their two centuries in India, the British acquired lasting fashions in art, interior design and religion (Theosophists combined all three), not to mention the national vice of tea consumption. The colonizers also plundered the languages they encountered, and an already polyglot English tongue edged closer to its present global reach. The words thug and assassin come directly from Hindi; these were attractive professions in some provinces.
The country penetrated by the early British traders was a hodgepodge of feudal states ruled by motley princes, some merely venal, others tyrannical and aggressive. The traders brought no plan of conquest; they stumbled incrementally into dominion over the colossal corpse of the Mogul empire. Only after they found themselves ruling a great nation did they consider the consequences of their acts. A characteristic figure of the time was Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859), a younger son without inheritance, who bore the ideals of the Enlightenment to India when he was just fifteen. By 1815 he had become Resident at Poona, where he had to juggle relations with various hostile powers. As historian Paul Johnson observed: "Much of central India was nominally ruled by rajas, in reality by their ministers or peshwas, and by the fierce Pindaris, or irregular military bands, composed of Marathas, Arabs, Jats, Afghans, criminal tribes and other marauders." In 1817 a British-led coalition put down the murderous Peshwa of the Maratha empire and Elphinstone was petitioned by the leaders of Poona to become Commissioner, effectively governing a vast and populous territory. In 1819, anticipating Britain’s future role in India, Elphinstone wrote: "The acquisition of knowledge by their subjects may have lost the French Haiti and the Spaniards South America, but it preserved half the world to the Romans, gave them a hold on the manners and opinions of their subjects and left them a kind of moral empire long after their physical power was destroyed."
With such men to administer their holdings, the British tended to leave a legacy of better government than other European imperial powers. France and Germany failed to build enduring structures of governance in their colonies, while Spain and Portugal left cesspits of corruption, autocracy and religious intolerance. Great Britain’s principal liability as a colonial power was its class system, which rankled Americans but could scarcely harm a country like India, where the ancient hereditary divisions of caste were far more rigid than any foreign hierarchy, and where dreadful practices like infanticide, human sacrifice and suttee (widow-burning) were commonplace until the Raj suppressed them. Freed by its "oppressors" in 1948, India inherited a parliamentary government, a functioning judiciary, and a common language with which to unify a subcontinent riven by hundreds of indigenous tongues. The new state soon revived its tradition of communal violence, but it has managed to retain its Western institutions for half a century.
In "The Bamboo Flute" Hope depicted a meeting of cultures still new and strange to each other as the painter Zoffany queried his colleague Kettle about India. Zoffany was preparing to emigrate after a disgrace at the Court, where his royal portrait had been poorly received. Kettle had already spent time in India and returned to make a name for himself with exotic oriental subjects. Hope contrived two letters in which the painters discoursed amiably about art while relating respective professional successes and woes. A third letter briefly introduced Zoffany to a colonial official and afforded a glimpse of life among these expatriates so far from their homes. But the fourth and longest letter was very different. Now in India for some time, Zoffany had dabbled in its languages, arts and religion, to which he felt himself increasingly drawn until one night something very peculiar happened to him. Zoffany received a visit from a mysterious artist with a sheaf of Indian paintings. The stranger said he had once called on Kettle, during the latter’s sojourn in India. Kettle had proven unreceptive. Maybe, the stranger suggested, Zoffany would understand better if he heard the folktale which inspired one of these scenes. It was the story of the god Krishna enchanted by the sight of three milk-maids bathing in a river, and the god ravishing them in turn with the sound of his flute. Here were the Sirens of another culture; yet they were mute, and it was Krishna who sang, with his Orphic (and phallic) instrument. So Hope, through the words of Zoffany's visitor, took his readers into an extraordinary meditation on art and poetry as conduits to the divine:
"Now, sir, that is the tale we love and know.
It tells more than the brush itself can show;
But what it does not tell you must find out.
You think it a crude folk-tale now, no doubt,
Pointless, perhaps, and unbecoming and odd
To all your Western notions of a god.
But to us Hindoos here, it has an end
Beyond itself and meanings which extend
Up to the heights of man’s philosophy.
Here is a simple one for you to see:
You are a painter. Let this myth impart
A parable of the artist and his art
And those who view his work; but it is true
Of the composer and the poet too.
As the god had to see the milk-maids nude
In absolute nakedness, the poet should
View nature, see into the heart of things
And show them to themselves in all he sings.
And as the milk-maids danced for him alone,
Each poem is a tryst with the unknown;
Naked we meet him in his nakedness:
The divine music asks of us no less,
Till we become the melody within.
Now, if you think this way, you may begin
To see our Indian painting with new eyes."
He paused and smiled and then, to my surprise
Holding me with his gaze, it seemed he grew
Larger and all his body turned dark blue.
You will scarce credit this, but, sir, I swear
Quite suddenly, he was no longer there
And all the sounds of night and man were mute
Except the faint strains of a distant flute.
The visitor was Krishna himself, vouchsafing the foreigner a glimpse of India’s very essence. So we come the long way back to Keats, whose theory of "negative capability" offered the poet as a passive vessel for insights from some ineffable and indefinable source. Hope proposed quite a different view in The New Cratylus, where he contrasted dreamy works like Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan" with the tediously self-conscious artifice of some Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Pindaric Odes. Hope concluded that neither the spontaneity of the dreamer nor the conscious control of the craftsman could produce the finest poetry unaided. Instead, great poetry sprang from the complex interplay between a subconscious element he called "dream work" and the directed effort of craft. Moreover, Hope refined the notion of negative capability to include such impersonal sources as history and science, which could be incorporated by the poetic imagination.
Though Keats was himself a consummate craftsman, his argument for self-negation through immersion in the senses has helped to lure generations of poets away from craft and deeper into the mire of self-absorption. Solipsism among poets and other artists has in turn rendered the Twentieth Century more vulnerable to the totalitarian impulse, which is nothing but selfishness writ large and projected on society (pace Ayn Rand). At century’s end Hope has afforded us the antidote of his thoughtful prose and the living bequest of his poetry.
Alan Sullivan
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