A Study of the Poetry of A. D. Hope

Abstract

The thesis is a consideration of Alec Derwent Hope's poetry published to the mid - 1980s. Attention is drawn to Hope's Modernism and the implications of recurrent themes. The poetry dramatises the possibilities for redemption of the sons of Adam. Elements of Hope's formative period which bear on his mature poetry include his upbringing, his juvenile prose and verse and the thinking about language, metre and aesthetics in which he engaged as a young man. As critic, poet and teacher Hope participated in Australian literary developments from the 1940s. His attitudes to Australian literature and Modernism show ambivalences. The loss of Eden is a dominant preoccupation but Hope's early mature poetry was prompted into being by the poet's personal doubts and disappointments and the spiritual aridity he perceived in the cultural environment. The poetry reveals ambiguities in Hope's attitudes to Freudianism and Surrealism. Genius and heroic will are a major preoccupation. Revisions in space - time theory are assimilated into the poetry. Creation as an Absolute becomes a dominant concept, expressed by the metaphor of the harmony of the universe. How man manages the human state is of eternal importance, especially for a poet. The poet - hero of will and pride yields place to the poet as watcher and the poet as activist. Thematic focus shifts towards the nonrational. Sexuality, will and pride remain central themes but are treated distinctively. The human male aspires to regain Eden; Mankind's greed is misuse of will; his hubristic attempts to interpret the universe show the limited logic Lucifer exercised. The capacity of human mind to respond to intimations of a spiritual state, and the abstraction of thought which language permits, are Hope's rationale for being a poet. The difficulty of the poet's task in bringing a spiritual influence to bear on non-poets is an insistent concern. Hope appears to have accepted that the conscious mind is inadequate to man's needs in his aspirations to spirituality.